carl@fire

Carl stepped into the—

"Oh, you must be Carl." A short, suited woman with carefully-styled hair stood in the elevator, looking up at him. She shook her head as she sized him up. "They told me you were big, but I didn't expect this."

Carl blinked, the disruption of his scheduled supply run causing a misfire in his brain's thought-processor.

"Gabriella Blake," she said holding up her free right hand. "Gab for short."

Carl shook the small hand with his, struggling to come to terms with the change to the most important routine in his day. He'd been forced to entertain Annie's annoying half-sister until way too late—after winding down Sammy, who had taken her aunt's offer to take her to get her learner's permit far too seriously—following which he'd gotten some sleep—but only after a long-ish session of cuddling with Annie, who wanted to vent and be comforted after a stressful evening—after which he'd gotten up early—drawing further attention from his eldest daughter regarding her potential learner's permit before she left for school, and a not-so-subtle reminder from his youngest that she reeeaaaallly wanted that sleepover on Friday—to try and make it to the office in time—except that anything involving time and going to or from the office for the next few weeks was going to be a total freaking impossibility since the resurfacing work had just begun and traffic was backed up forever—to figure out what the heck was going on with that Thursday afternoon thing, only to discover that there was nothing. All the system logs, which he'd previously skimmed through, were actually missing time for a few minutes beginning at the fateful one thirty seven, and this had been the case as far back as he looked. He'd dug deep into his coffee reserves in order to—

"Get in, I was just coming down to get you," Gab said, holding the door open. She sipped from the mug in her left hand.

A mug that held tea.

Carl stepped into the elevator with a sense of growing dread.

"Not much of a talker, eh?" Gab said, pressing the button for the seventh floor.

"Sorry," Carl said, rousing himself. "Just a little surprised." He paused for a moment. "Do we have time for a quick—"

"No time for surprise, Carl," Gab said, shaking her head as she leaned against the wall with her arms crossed and her teacup poised for another sip. "We've got a lot to talk about."

"Okay," Carl said slowly, shifting his approach to deal with one of the High-Powered types. "If you want, I can give you some background on our setup here and—"

"Don't need it," Gab said, giving a little shake of her head. "I did some poking around after I logged in—thanks, by the way, for having my accounts all set up—and I already know we're going to have to make some changes."

Carl…wasn't quite sure what to make of that.

"I checked out your implementation docs on the network share," she continued, giving him an approving nod, "nice work there, too. Well-written, easy to understand. I like that."

Of course they'd be well-written and easy to understand. If the documentation couldn't be understood, then—

"First thing we'll need to do is go over your reasoning for segmenting all the department networks," Gab said. The door opened, and she breezed past him, not even looking over her shoulder to see that he was following. "I don't like it. Adds overhead, adds complexity, I don't think we need it. We can increase local throughput a little by consolidating all the networks, and we can compensate for the relative change in security by enforcing a stricter anti-virus and malware policy—not to mention a stricter domain-level blacklist for sites we don't want people visiting—across all the machines."

It was then that Carl realized it: one of the few things worse than having a boss who was much dumber than him was having a boss who was just as intelligent but had a completely opposite opinion on how everything should be managed.