Storytime: Please Reboot.

August 4th, 2010

Teresa’s chair was no longer comfortable, even to slouch in; its back a mass of crumpled and ruined springs covered limply with a tattered layer of something that was probably meant to cushion once.  She slouched in it anyway from force of habit, and tried to pay attention to someone who had been promoted past her because of his shiny haircut.  His name was Geoff, and he was trying very hard to sound as though he knew what he was talking about.  It was precisely because of this that he was failing.
“Drivers up to date?”
“Ah, I’ve been told so.”
“And you’ve rebooted?” she asked.
“Uhm, yes.”
“Virus scan?”
“Fully updated, fully, ah, operational, ran the deepest and most thorough I could set it to.  Nothing.”
Teresa shifted her shoulders in a futile effort to remove a particularly rusty and pointed spring from her spinal column.  “You’ve defragmented?  Ran a disc cleanup?”
“Yes and yes.  No change.  It still crashes.  Every, uh, fifteen minutes now, instead of every fifteen hours.”
Teresa sighed, gustily and with weariness in her lungs.  “Yes, it’s hardware trouble then,” she said, knowing that even people like Geoff could be trusted to operate basic push-button maintenance, provided that the interface was brightly coloured enough.  And with the day nearly over, too.  Damn it.  “I’ll go get suited up.  You unlock the back door, will you?  And I’d better be getting overtime for this.”  Geoff said something or other that she didn’t have the heart to listen to as she left for her locker.
Teresa HATED hardware trouble.  The boots were too clunky and made her feet sore for hours.

And so it was that Teresa Lamb found herself suited up at the massive, overbuilt, heavily-locked mainframe door and ready to go repair some ass, in her least-favourite-part of her last-choice-as-a-job.  She pulled on her last bit of equipment – the bulky, smoked-lens helmet – and immediately felt it begin to go to work on whatever her chair had left undamaged in her upper back and neck.
“Ready,” she told Geoff.  If there was one consolation in this whole sorry affair, she reminded herself, it was that the air filter made her sound a little bit like Darth Vader.  Geoff was flinching when she talked and he didn’t even know why.
He nodded and unlocked the door, a two-and-a-half-minute process that involved the hesitant entering, correcting, and reentering of many codes, the removal and reapplication of several bolts, and an incredibly small and discrete key whose tiny, intricate serrations were just complicated enough to give a mathematician a week’s worth of uneasy sleeping.
At last it was done, the door swung open a crack, and Teresa stepped outside and into the mainframe, a warm sun in a cloudy sky far overhead and the jutting, crudely-angled towers of the computer’s RAM forming little stonehengettes all around her.  In the distance, the whurr-whush of enormous fan blades sounded, eternally scraping layers off the heavy blanket of heat that lay over the whole assembly like a cloud, all four fenced-off acres of it.
Somewhere in there was whatever was causing the crash.  It could be something as big as a small house or as small as a large breadbox.
“Ah, fuck,” said Teresa, and stepped forwards.  Tech support was hell.

The first place to check, of course, was the cooling fans.  If they were having trouble, the system would overheat.  The easiest to check, the most important thing to keep running, and the least likely to be the actual cause since Teresa figured that if they were actually broken the fire would’ve spread over half the state by now, everyone in the building would be dead, and some bureaucrat hundreds of miles away would be writing a very polite and terse letter to her family, giving them condolences and asking how on earth they hadn’t noticed in all these years that their daughter was mentally incapacitated.
She adjusted her headset.  “Geoff?”
“Uh, yes?”
“Would you please turn down the fans?  Just flick ‘em off and then on again, the spin’ll stop for long enough that I can get close.”
“Right.  One second…”
She didn’t hear the click-clack of the switch, but right away she felt the breeze drop away from her, leaving the mainframe warm and still, like an empty oven.
“There.”
“Heading in.”
Teresa kept a close eye out as she jogged down the corridor formed by the forest of RAM obelisks, eyes leaping from one to the other like geek-monkeys, searching for any weaknesses, any obvious filth clogging them.  Nothing obvious presented itself, but then again she was only seeing a fraction of a fraction of the possible problems.  Something she deeply resented.
I am a programmer – a good programmer – and I went to tech school, she told herself as she climbed over a low-lying ridge of power cables.  I’m meant to be off writing code somewhere while eating gourmet chocolate bars over my keyboard, not running tech support for middle-management morons and having to buy a goddamned gym membership just so I can run around all day poking at bits of my company’s mainframe in a hazard suit without having a stroke.
“Uh, how are the fans?”
Teresa counted to three and reminded herself that it was cruel (and more importantly, fruitless) to yell at children.  “Not there yet.  Almost.”
“Ah, right.”
The cooling fans were impressive, Teresa had to admit.  She’d lived in buildings smaller than them, and despite the size of the blades they still zipped by with remarkable speed, with edges sharp enough to shave your armpits with.  Even now, revving up after Geoff’s momentary shut-down, they were going along at a good clip and accelerating.  She figured she had maybe a minute and a half before they were back up to full speed, and then the wind would get too strong for her to stay near.  Regulations said that the fans should be shut down at all times while anyone was in the mainframe but then you wouldn’t be able to leave the computer running while you searched for whatever was wrong, and that made diagnostics even more of a bitch.  Of course, losing limbs was scarcely any fun either, but that had only happened twice so far, and both the techs who’d suffered it hadn’t exactly been the sharpest knives in the drawer.
“Fans clear,” she reported after a quick jog around the perimeter.  “No obstructions, no dirt buildup.  Moving on to heat sink.”
The run to the sink was more pleasant.  For one, the fan was almost up to full speed again – a much-appreciated cooldown – and for another the wind gave a nice little push at her back for the entire stretch.
If the fan was imposing, the heat sink was its polar opposite: a bland truck-sized brick whose only distinguishing features were some large, flat pieces of metal that served as cooling fins.  Its sole issue was similarly mundane, a minor dust problem that faded away with a few vicious swipes of Teresa’s back-mounted vacuum.
“Nada on the heat sink.  That’s all the easy, simple bits done with,” she declared.  “I’ll hit up the processor next.”
Given that the processor was on the far side of the main batteries – which were only a few stories short of being skyscrapers, albeit rather small ones – reaching it was easier said than done.  By the time Teresa reached the processor she was out of breath, had sore feet, and had acquired a distracting habit of fantasizing Geoff being torn apart by packs of shirtless gymnasts.  She had four younger brothers and had never in her life heard so many variations on “are we there yet?”
“Right,” she said, fishing a cable out of her side pack and clipping to a small peg.  “I’m at the processor.”
In stark contrast to the batteries, the processor was easily the smallest part of the whole mainframe.  It wasn’t much bigger than a closet, provided the closet being compared belonged to a supermodel with ADHD.
“Is, uh, that the problem?”
Teresa rolled her eyes.  “Could be.  That’s what I’m finding out.”  She squatted on the dirt and pounded the peg a few inches, then attached the cable’s free end to her suit.  “Grounded.  Going to open this thing up.”
“That’s, ah, safe…right?”
“Yes,” lied Teresa, because it was shorter than “exactly as safe as everything else involved in this job” and would produce the same reaction from Geoff anyways.
She rubbed her rubberize gloves together for reassurance’s sake, gripped the incredibly bulky and palm-cuttingly sharp-edged metal handle, and yanked open the door to the processor.
When her vision faded back in again, she was lying on her back three yards away from the door, which was spitting out sparks in a few colours she was moderately certain weren’t real.  Her headset had broken down into a static yammer, and there was an unpleasant burning smell that she saw was the result of her grounding cable partially vaporizing.
“Overclocked,” she said, and was amazed that her tongue was still in her mouth, or at least something that felt like it.
The yammering faded away from her ears as she struggled to her feet, and she realized that it hadn’t been static, it was merely Geoff babbling.  “Are you okay?  What did you say?  Is the processor all right?”
Teresa staggered over to the open door and looked inside cautiously, leaning back away from the sparks.  “I’m fine, I think.  And the processor is too, but I’ll need you to go into BIOS and take it down a few zillion clock cycles.  I think one of the engineers must’ve started up a project to soup it up and dropped it before he implemented the bit that left it within safety limits.”
There was a silence.
Teresa did not sigh.  It was very difficult, even with her mouth feeling like someone had played pick-up-sticks with her filings.  “I’ll explain what BIOS is later.  Listen, the processor’s dangerous, but it’s not actually exploding, and,” – she craned her neck a little, wincing as a particularly virulent globule of electricity burst near her helmet – “it looks like it’s operating properly.  Dangerously, but properly.  We can nip it in the bud now before it blows up, but it hasn’t so far.  Not your problem.”
“Any, uh, suggestions for where to check next?”
Teresa shut the door with a series of ginger yet hateful kicks, expecting a fresh blackout at any second.  “RAM next.  Then the hard drives, then, if all else is fine… then I go to the motherboard.”  And if I have to do that, I’ll be getting time and a half at least or there’ll be hell to pay.  This job’s getting more than a little ridiculous for one tech support girl.

Checking the RAM was always tedious, but also mercifully unexciting.  Most problems with it were solved by painstakingly wading through the forest of its rows with a hammer and chisel and excavating bad obelisks, marking them for replacement.  Except for this time, because, as would happen now and again, a small pack of stray dogs had gotten in.
“I’ll uhm, send a maintenance team to check the perimeter first thing,” vowed Geoff, safe in his office.
“That’s sweet of you,” said Teresa, rocking unsteadily atop her perch of ten gigabytes of random access memory.  She aimed a kick at a snapping muzzle, and missed.  “Got anything to spare for me?”
“Just scare them off.  Uh, yell at them a bit, turn on your vacuum or something.”
Teresa could’ve pointed out that any animal willing to live inside the mainframe obviously had no issue with noise, or possibly just sworn like a sailor with a flesh wound, but decided against it.  Both would be about as much use as trying to talk the dogs around to her point of view.
No, there was another, much more cathartic backup plan.  After all, the suit was designed to be durable and protective, and she already had her hammer and chisel close at hand…
“Geoff?”
“Uh, yes?”
“Send someone out here to do janitorial work in the next few hours.  I damn well didn’t come out here to clean up, and there’s going to be a hell of a mess.  Back in a minute”
“Pardon?”
She switched off her headset.  He’d only ask more questions if he listened in.

Teresa had limped her way halfway down the last aisle of RAM before she remembered to turn her headset on again.
“Hello?  Hello?  Is that you?”
“Yes.  Sorry about that, lost track of time.”
“Everything all, ah, right?  It fixed?”
“Yes and no.”
“Uh?”
This time Teresa couldn’t stop the sigh, but Geoff was too agitated to hear it.  “Yes, everything’s fine.  My leg is sore, but everything is fine.  And no, it isn’t fixed because everything’s fine.  All the RAM’s as fresh as a field of daisies.  Our issue isn’t here.”
“Oh.”
“And when you send that janitor –“
“What janitor?”
Teresa counted to five, and wiped her hammer off again while she was at it.  “The one I asked for.  Tell him to pack the extra-heavy-duty stuff.”
“Right, right.”
A bruised leg really wasn’t all that bad, all things considered.  The dogs hadn’t quite known what to do with her after she’d slipped on the way down and landed on the biggest one’s head.  Not the way she’d wanted to start, but she couldn’t argue with results.

“So, uh, how’re the hard drives?”
Teresa pulled the goggles off, restoring the more familiar, smokey-lens view of her helmet as the night-vision faded away.  “Fine.  No scratches, spinning smoothly, dust-free – well, even more so now that I’ve given them a go-over – and again, cooled properly.”  She hauled herself out of the maintenance hatch and to her feet, feeling the blood rush back into her body from her head and her hair grudgingly reflatten itself to her scalp.  The hatch clanged most satisfyingly as she kicked it shut and sealed it.
“Should you, ah, double-check?”
Teresa looked down the side of the drives, some fifty feet below, and felt her leg start to ache again.  That cramp halfway up had been a better stimulant than forty cups of coffee.  “No, I’m pretty sure.”
“How sure?”
She waited, just to see if he’d notice.  Nothing happened.  “Absolutely,” she said, and wished that a dog she’d somehow missed would turn up.  She needed an outlet.
“To the, uh, motherboard then?”
The ladder looked longer by the second.  “I thought you’d never ask.”

The motherboard was different.  For one thing, it was underground, accessible only via a crawlspace with a foot and a half of headroom.  For another, it covered the full four acres of the mainframe. For a third, it was, in Teresa’s opinion, designed personally by Satan, who had decreed that no lights be permitted to prevent excess heat and that only the bulkiest, most awkward suits possible be given to technical support staff when they went into it.  And yet the job description hadn’t mentioned claustrophobia being an issue.
“Nothing,” she said into the headset at long, long, very long last, staring down at the intricate, waist-thick circuits beneath her, underneath the mesh grid she lay stomach-down upon.  “Absolutely nothing.  Zilch.  Nada.  The closest thing to a problem I found was an empty chip bag someone else must’ve dropped.”  I’d love to meet the guy casual enough to take off his helmet and have a snack down here. “There are literally no other.  The place is fine.  There is no problem.”
A conspicuously empty silence was her reply.
“Geoff?”
More of the same answered her, swiftly and surely.
Teresa started counting and crawling.  By the time she reached the manhole out of the motherboard’s crawlspace she had reached four hundred and eleven.  By the time she hauled herself out into the warm but fast-moving air of the mainframe’s above-ground portion, she counted four hundred and twenty-nine.  Then she stopped counting and started screaming, mixed with swearing.
“SIX HOURS, YOU PRICK!” she yelled up at the stars.  “SIX HOURS OVERTIME!  AND WHEN DID YOU GO HOME, HUH?  HOW MUCH WRIGGLE ROOM DO YOU HAVE ON THAT?   I’M GOING TO TEAR OUT YOUR STOMACH AND USE IT AS AN ASH TRAY, AND THEN I’M GOING TO START SMOKING!”

Stomping and frenzied profanity accompanied Teresa all the way back to the lockers, where the slow, laborious, glorious process of removing the safety suit calmed her again.  Fine.  She’d go and enter her hours onto Geoff’s terminal.  Claim it was automated or something, he’d never know the difference.  He wouldn’t cheat her out of this, damnit.
She flicked on the computer, and nothing happened.
Teresa gave it a long, slow look that you could flash-fry a marshmallow with, and pressed power again.
Nothing.
Carefully, calmly, and with as much care as she could manage, Teresa moved Geoff’s big, useless, expensive desk a foot to one side and examined his terminal’s power cable.
It was half-unplugged.  Part of the cord was caught on a broken, discarded stapler wedged between the desk and the wall.
Teresa sat in the big, comfy, cushioned chair and thought for a while.  Then she did some things.  Then she went home and slept like a dropped brick.

She came in half an hour late for work the next day, and was unsurprised to find that no one had noticed.  Half the office was up gossiping and the other half was working furiously.
“Haven’t heard?” said Graham, one desk over, when she oh-so-politely asked what was going on.  “Some middle-management idiot was downloading porn and picked up a whole pack of viruses.  Half the system’s on a knife’s edge now, and the only thing changing for him if it goes down is whether or not they sue him on the way out the door.”
“Full work week then,” sighed Teresa.
“Hey, at least it’s not hardware.”
“No,” she agreed.  “It isn’t.”

“Please Reboot,” copyright Jamie Proctor, 2010.

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