“Aww, you’re forgiven. My day is going all right. We seemed to have a hacker in our online system, though. Well, not sure it’s a hacker yet, but the work I did last week has totally reverted and my code needs to be re-written.”
She certainly sounded like a computer woman who knew what she was talking about. I wished Josh was there to hear her talk about her job. It would have put him at ease with all his conspiracy sugar baby talk.
“I’m not sure I understood all of that, but I hope your day gets better.”
“It’s all right. I mean, it’s not like it’s my personal account. At least at the end of the day I get to go home. But I really hate when it looks like I suck at my job. I’m already the only woman in my IT department,” she said. “Oh, crap, I need to run. Get online and I’ll message you there; it looks like I’m working then.”
“Okay,” I laughed as she hung up quickly.
My adrenaline surged at the idea that she wanted to talk to me even though she was at work and might get in trouble for it. I quickly logging into my Dating the Rich account and pulled up the instant messaging to talk to her. She wasn’t there yet and I waited, and waited, and waited.
Talking to Delilah felt weirdly perfect to me. When she finally came online, I couldn’t help but get excited that I’d have a few moments to sneak a conversation in with her while she was at work.
Chapter Nine
Delilah
“So, what did you do to the system this time?” Robert said as he hovered over my desk.
“Like I said in my message to you, I didn’t do it. I actually had the error fixed last week and my changes have been removed. I think it’s possible someone has hacked into the account, but I’m not sure.”
It was so frustrating to talk with Robert about what was going on. He was, by far, the most useless person at our company. He didn’t really do anything. His whole job was to supervise other people while they did their jobs. I didn’t even know what skills the guy actually had. He certainly was good at delegating work and not helping with anything.
He was also good at making me feel like crap and like I wasn’t doing my job well enough.
The way he talked to me, it was as if he thought I was just pretending to know about computers and didn’t really know how to do my job. He didn’t seem to think a woman could do much and often made rude comments about any number of the women in the company. It was surprising that he had lasted so long at our organization because most of the people in charge didn’t seem to share his belief that women weren’t capable.
“Or, it’s possible you don’t know what you’re doing and you messed up?” he asked and then stood there waiting for me to agree with him.
There was no way I could have removed all my own work and I knew it, but I also had learned that arguing with Robert was very counterproductive for me actually getting my work done. He had the strange ability of twisting everything around and making me feel like maybe I had done something wrong.
I could have explained to him what work I had actually completed, and if he had been a halfway decent manager, he might ha
ve asked that of me. But instead, he just stood there waiting for me to tell him he was right and that I had totally messed up my own work. It was ridiculous, and I wasn’t about to give in to him. I wasn’t going to let him think that I had messed everything up when I knew I hadn’t.
“It’s possible there is another reason for the errors,” I said. “We have a lot of old code in here and some of it might be interacting poorly with the new code. I’ll go back through it line by line and see what I can find.”
“You’re the one who crashed her computer and had to get a new one last week, right?” he asked.
“Yes, but that wasn’t because of something I did. It just crashed and wouldn’t turn back on,” I protested, although I was starting to see where he was coming from on thinking I had something to do with the errors. “This is the new computer, and it’s working great, I really appreciate you making it happen so quickly so I could keep up with my job tasks.”
My attempt to praise him went unnoticed as he just huffed and tried to figure out what it was he was supposed to do with my information regarding the possible hacking. I really didn’t know if it was hacking, but there was a bigger error than I thought I was capable of fixing and I needed help. He was my supervisor and seemed so worried with what I was doing with my time, I’d hoped he would actually try and help fix the problem.
“Do you know it’s a hacker?” he asked.
“No, I don’t. I could have Tom come sit with me and go over what’s going on. Is that all right with you?”
“Tom’s on vacation,” he said. “I’ll call the computer guy who brought that computer in for you. He knows a lot.”
“But it’s not actually a computer issue, Robert; it’s an internal server issue that-”
“Okay, you’re welcome. He’s a high-level consultant. I’m sure he will be able to figure out what you’ve done. Hell, maybe if he’s really good, I’ll even hire him.”
“Robert, it’s an internal issue and that computer guy doesn’t know our system; he just knows the hardware that he brought in. I really think-”
“I’ll see if he can come today,” he said. “Try not to break anything else until then,” he said as he walked away.
“Don’t quit your job,” Mattie said as she leaned over and tried to calm me down. “Remember, you have bills. You have a son. Don’t quit your job,” she continued to say quietly to me as Robert walked away.