A Quick Taste of Revenge
An Unwelcome Reunion
If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my decades toiling in the information technology trenches all across Atlanta, it’s that the break room is the beating heart of any organization.
Any organization worth its salt enough to have unlimited amounts of free, strong caffeine, of course. The preferred brain fuel for professional nerds the world over.
And the break room at my new gig has the good stuff as far as I’m concerned. Bags of fresh, perfectly roasted beans, and a gleaming, silvery object of worship in the form of an industrial-sized grinder to turn those beans into the raw materials for coffee.
The heavenly elixir I had on the brew worked its magic on my weary mind and body through smell alone, even before I brought out my tankard-sized mug.
As usual, I timed my arrival early enough to avoid the break room rush, and to give myself a chance to enjoy the red-tinged September morning outside the wall of windows. Here on the east side of Atlanta—and pretty much anywhere in Georgia once you get south of the mountains—we won’t see a sign of autumn for a while yet. Not when it’s still routinely in the eighties out there.
So the fifth-floor view’s all green treetops with a few other plate-glass towers close by, and the much bigger towers of downtown Atlanta off in the distance, doing their best to blind me with reflected sunlight.
Yeah, I admit it. The vista is nice and all, but I’m here for the peace and quiet before I’m overrun with needy clients and their network security woes.
And to dump double the amount of ground coffee in the brewer’s hopper before anyone can wander in to stop me. Tastes better that way, and gives me a premium solitary morning jolt.
We’ve only had to stage a bean resupply raid on accounting a couple of times since I’ve been here. I figure they’ll get their ordering schedule sorted out soon enough.
The rest of the break room—aside from the all-important altar dedicated to high-end wake-up-juice machinery—fits the general twenty-teens corporate mold well enough. Plenty of little round white tables with matching chairs, comfortable enough for an ambitiously quick lunch or coffee break, but carefully engineered to put your ass to sleep if you’re tempted to hang around longer than that.
Not one but two refrigerators the same stainless steel as the coffee apparatus, with printed signs warning everyone who dares glance that way to POLICE YOUR OWN LEFTOVERS and RESPECT YOUR TEAMMATES: DON’T POACH THEIR FOOD.
Sad state of affairs when adults need that kind of instruction right in their faces every day.
And I’ve been on the wrong end of too many disappearing sandwiches and accidentally knocked-over containers full of unidentified biohazardous material abandoned in a work fridge to dare argue. Not to mention a whole lot of the job description for IT really is code for, “You’d be amazed at how many adults either can’t read the instructions or can’t be bothered to try.”
Anyway, I’m in too good a mood this morning to argue.
I not only successfully managed to dodge the extremely long weekend full of Corporate Team Building Torment in the North Georgia mountains by making my daring escape last Friday.
Unnoticed and, so far, entirely un-scolded.
I also managed to bust my work-crush turned full-fledged girlfriend Laura out of there too. The whole insane adventure will hopefully make for a fabulous running-for-our-sanity origin story someday.
And let me just say we had a hell of a weekend celebrating our great escape.
Enough so that I couldn’t be any more tired if I’d remained trapped in the land of endless rah-rahs and company spirit instead of cutting out of there faster than you can say Team Obstacle Course.
I only dropped her back at her place late last night. And spent the rest of the night wishing I’d gone inside with her.
So naturally when I heard someone walking in soft-soled shoes across the shiny white break room tiles behind me, I assumed that was my sweetie, sneaking in to wish me good morning.
I turned, big goofy smile on my face, and froze.
This was a guy, for one thing. A guy I’d never seen before, in this break room, during my pre-work alone time, or any other time.
A little taller than average, kind of rounded face with flyaway brown hair that was only going to keep retreating across his skull, but he had the good sense to let it do its thing rather than attempt a combover. The usual tan khakis/red golf shirt/brown loafers combo anyone who’s ever made their way through the Corporate America Display of Lazy Fashion would recognize.
He seemed almost as surprised to see another human more-or-less functional as I was, but he managed a careful half smile, which was miles ahead of my locked-up-solid mind and mouth.
When I tried to catch my breath enough to at least attempt a standard-issue generic good morning, my lungs ceased all operations.
They caught on before my eyes and my brain that while I had no idea what this guy was doing in my break room, who he was presented a hell of a lot less of a mystery.
I had seen him before.
Worked with him before.
Quit a job with no concern whatsoever for the towering inferno of bridges I left behind to get away from him, which is not the way I tend to make a career change.
Not unless something—or someone—at said job did something to deserve it.
Mike Billings fit that bill better than anyone I’ve ever run across, and I’ve run across some Grade-A Prime IT Assholes in my years in the business.
None of that mattered anywhere near as much as finding out what the hell Asshole #1 was doing standing in my break room at my great new gig.
“Morning,” he said, clearly unaware of the embers buried under years and several better jobs fanning themselves into a good and angry flame in my belly. “Sorry, didn’t mean to interrupt. I’m usually the only one crazy enough to show up this early.”
I managed to nod slowly enough that I heard my neck muscles creak.
“Yeah, sorry, morning to you, too. Getting an early start myself, just after some coffee.”
He sauntered forward, going for one of the stupidly wasteful polystyrene cups beside the coffee machine, and throwing me face-first into a memory I’d rather have left in the depths.
Same Mike with a little more hair, standing in another break room on the north side of Atlanta. One hand on his hip, the other shaking a finger in a true sweetheart of an office manager’s face.
Lecturing her about how ridiculous it was for him to have to bring in his own coffee cups just to appease some bleeding-heart environmentalist liberal bullshit.
The jackass never gave the office manager or anyone else the chance to point out how much money that saved the company, and how they’d put the investment back into a charity fund.
For the mercifully short time I worked there, Mike never tired of whining about the damn coffee cups. Not even when one of our co-workers got sick to death of hearing it and brought in a bag of the disposable kind to shut him up before someone strangled him.
“Smells like you’re making rocket fuel there,” he said, laughing. “Always did like a good strong brew. That and a company smart enough to avoid falling into that recycling nonsense. Not that there’s anything wrong with you bringing in your own. We should have the choice is all, and we need good manufacturing jobs. This stuff is actually made of the byproducts of oil refining, you know, so the truth is these are recycling.”
I closed my eyes and breathed in heavenly coffee-scented air that didn’t calm me as much as it would have only a few short minutes before, then let it out as quietly as I could.
Yep, same guy.
Same argument.
Magically brought forward thirty years, fully intact from the mid-1990s.
He even spun the cup between his fingers the same irritating way that made a squeak that set my teeth on edge.
Mike had somehow discovered a time machine, but one that only transported jerks.
“By all means, ladies first.”
I looked up with my usual twinge at that word that I’d hated since my older relatives tormented me with it when I was a kid back in the 70s and 80s. They thought it was just so terribly cute that I wanted to be called young woman rather than young lady.
And the ones who were still kicking around the planet never let me forget it, even now that I was hardly a young anything in my mid-fifties.
Mike had absolutely wallowed in using that word, and never failed to add that same condescending sneer.
“Sure, thanks,” I said, willing him to at least shut up if he couldn’t vanish back into whatever toilet-shaped rip in the space-time continuum he’d excreted himself through.
I grabbed the polished steel carafe and loaded my tankard almost to the top, using half of the brew and not giving a damn. I stepped back to add my customary splash of creamer and one sugar, debating whether to grab my usual couple of ice cubes from the freezer.
I know, that’s hardly standard around these parts, meaning in the US and in nerd-space. But scalding my mouth first thing in the morning has a nasty habit of putting me in a sour mood all day.
Not that I needed much help with that on this particular Monday.
“Save some for me, why dontcha?” Mike said in exactly the same fake boisterous tone I wished I could forget. That I had forgotten until today.
How had he escaped unscathed by time, fate, our changing society, or simply having a fed-up coworker knock his head against a balky server repeatedly until he stopped being annoying?
I decided to grab the ice after all and risk another of his pathetic little quips. Waiting for my mood-stabilizing drug of choice to cool to a drinkable temperature seemed like a terrible idea.
He turned before I could move, pouring a glug of creamer and following that up with three sugars to create a pale slurry that barely passed for coffee.
“Anyway, I’m Mike. Just started this morning, gonna do my best to wrangle the girls on the help desk into line. You know how it is, trying to get a bunch of the usual parade of warm bodies answering the phones to follow some kind of standards before they’re out of a job and out the door.”
Chapter 2
Mike waited, eyebrows raised, obviously expecting me to fall right into the typical break room banter despite the fact that I’d barely said a word. If his social skills were as ossified as his points of view on recycling and using words like ladies and girls, he probably hadn’t noticed me not speaking much.
In this case, getting it over with was the fastest way to get the hell away from him.
But all I could think was Don’t say Angie, Don’t say Angie, over and over again. Which of course made my shock-addled mind struggle to focus on anything besides my own first name.
The best I could manage to squeeze out was my middle name instead.
Not exactly original, I know. Disgust mixed with panic does that to the best of us.
“June. My name’s June. Network security. Enjoy your day.”
He blinked, and for a gut-wrenching second I thought he’d recognized me from all those years ago. I suppose it’s possible. I hardly look like the kid a couple of years out of college I’d been back then.
Same wavy brown hair, just shorter now and shot through with a respectable amount of silver. Metal-framed nerd glasses instead of contacts after way too many years staring at way too many screens.
Still wearing my own version of generic corporate uniform, with black pants and a purple button-up shirt I’d chosen because I wanted to look cute for Laura.
I have no idea why I gave him my middle name, except that the idea of a stroll through the Gallery of Bad Jobs Better Left in the Past did not sound like my idea of fun.
He finally shrugged and held up his wasteful foam cup full of vaguely coffee-flavored sugar water.
“You have a good day too.”
He strolled out again, not exactly whistling, not through his lips, but making an even more irritating noise by blowing across the roof of his mouth.
I put my tankard on the nearest table, and yes, stomped over to the fridge. I’m not proud of it, but my feet did indeed strike the floor with considerably more force than necessary.
And it didn’t even make me feel better.
When I turned back, three sliver-shaped ice cubes freezing my palm, Laura stood in the break room doorway.
An absolutely disgusted expression on her gorgeous face.
“You will never believe who I just saw in the hallway, Angie. Never. Talk about a Ghost of Bad Jobs Past.”
“You’re joking. You worked with him too?”
She shuddered, and the part of me that wasn’t icked out with the sliminess of encountering Mike Billings perked up right away. Laura’s thick honey-blonde hair shifted across her shoulders, and she rolled her huge blue eyes in a way that captured my grumpy GenX heart all over again.
“Unfortunately yes, I crossed paths with that jackass. Way back in the bad old days of the early Nineties, when women in IT were few and far between. I hadn’t quite developed my current levels of Don’t Give a Shit when it comes to guys like that, or maybe there just aren’t as many of them around. Anyway, I’m sorry to say he knocked me for a pretty bad loop.”
My chest tightened, and I had to fight back a powerful urge to cross the room and hug Laura tight. We’d both agreed over our amazing spending-every-minute-together weekend that keeping things on the quiet side at work was best, at least in the beginning. More to keep such a delicious secret to ourselves than for what anyone else would think.
Right now that felt like the worst idea ever hatched between two love-struck humans to me.
Partly because my next logical action would be to trot myself out of our calm, cozy break room and give Mike’s head that long-overdue series of server-smacks myself.
Instead I dropped my half-melted ice cubes into my coffee and crossed the room to take Laura’s appropriately huge coffee vessel from her hands.
“Leave room for creamer, right?” I said. “Anything I need to know about how Mike treated you while I’m formulating my grand plan for revenge? There’s still time to tweak it toward the much more interesting and exciting side if necessary.”
Laura grinned and I predictably went weak in the knees, but somehow managed to stop myself from kneeling before the caffeine altar.
“If you brewed the coffee, no need for creamer. I might try that ice trick, though.” She walked up beside me, rubbing her hands together like she was about to feast on a particularly juicy carcass of jackass, roasted to perfection.
“Revenge, huh? Of the Angie-inspired kind? That I’m one-hundred-percent up for, Monday morning or not. As far as that jerk is concerned, he didn’t do anything physical, or else I would have knocked him a good one and brought my friends in to finish him off. He’s more the kind to do everything he can to undermine people’s confidence and make them feel like they’re in over their heads. If he couldn’t manage that, he wasn’t above getting us fired if he could.”
“Sounds like he didn’t vary his vile bullshit much,” I said, handing her the not-quite-full vat of coffee. “He set his sights on me after I caught him changing folder permissions on other people’s computers so he could snoop. Back in the long-ago days when Windows NT was cutting-edge and the world was fresh and new. My proof was too iron-clad for him to get rid of me. But I finally got sick of his bullshit and got rid of myself. Best career change I ever made.”
Laura’s laugh lightened the greasy gloom of that burst of rancid memory.
“I believe it!” she said. “I caught his ass snooping around in other people’s email inboxes. Turned out he was every bit as ignorant about how Exchange and Outlook worked as he was that we’d magically exited the 1950s and his patriarchal ideas about the workplace. I’m sorry to admit he circled the good-old-boy wagons fast enough to get me fired. Made a huge show of having me escorted out of the building as if I’d sold top-secret information on the remarkable amount of porn stashed on the firm’s computers to their biggest competitor. Kinda wish I had.”
“I suspect we’re either avoiding or assuming a big part of the story here,” I said. “Did you ever see or hear of him pulling this crap with men? I never did.”
She grabbed her own ice from the fridge and slowly walked back toward me, shaking her head.
“Not once. And you’re nowhere near the first woman I’ve talked to since who ran into his misogynistic reindeer games, either. Honestly, a few of us suspected he agitated to hire women just so he could run them through his heart-and-soul grinder. I was never sure whether he was actually trying to drive us out of the field or if he got off on it in some especially twisted way that I never want to know more about. The worst part is he did drive women out of the field. Several that I know of.”
I leaned against one of the tables and sipped my coffee, breathing in the strong, earthy aroma.
“There were a bunch more of those knuckle-draggers around back then,” I said. “Still too many now, but it’s gotten better. They seem to have been yanked kicking and screaming into an era where girls not only dig computers and tech, no matter how much they might wish it wasn’t so, but we’re damn good at it. Listen, since he’s made it this long, we may not be able to shove his antiquated ass out of IT, or even out of this place. But we might be able to get even and have a great time doing it.”
Laura stood beside me, shoulder to shoulder, close enough that I could smell the citrus of her shampoo and her warm, clean skin underneath. We probably had a good half hour before anyone else wandered in, but with the earlier Unpleasant Surprise of the Jackass Kind, I managed to restrain myself.
“You know,” she said, “there’s quite a bit we can get done around here between the two of us. Once you’re in charge of network security and email, the vengeful sky’s the limit. And I’d bet we can each get in touch with some of Mike’s other victims, too.”
I leaned in for a risky and risqué peck on her soft cheek, and her low, sexy giggle made it all worthwhile no matter what happened.
“There are so many reasons we’re a good match,” I said. “And a dreadful one, if you’re the kind to end up deserving our special attention. Let’s see what we can’t cook up, shall we?”
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