Missy found a problem, sorta

I was bored. With Melissa gone all week the apartment felt empty. With Ben away at the conferance, Missy’s workload had decreased as well. Puttering around on my games had lost its glare by Wednesday. My side projects all seemed to be halted. So out of boredom, I began searching through FinOp’s code. I told myself it was just to familiarize myself with it. That I was just seeing what else was there other than the CSS and other small fixes I had been implementing.

In the middle of the day my jaw dropped. There was no way the code in front of me was doing what I thought it was. Double and even triple checking it revealed that it was worse than I had originally thought. Someone had placed a back door in the app. At first I thought it was just a security hole, but I quickly realized that someone was actively using that security loophole and using it to siphon money from the company. Pulling out Missy’s work phone, I had trouble thinking of it as mine and it was hard to think of it as Melissa’s anymore, I began to text the only person I could.

Missy - Hey, r u busy?
Missy - 911 emergency for work
Ben - In all hands whats up
Missy - Huge whole in code someone stealing from company
Ben - ????? how?
Missy - Think it was the consultants from before i start
Ben - SHIT SHIT SHIT
Ben - Laptop at home cant fix here
Missy - I can fix it easy
Ben - Do it

Dropping the phone to the table I began to work. While I had claimed it would be easy, it was anything but. Hours fell away as I exercised all of my knowledge. It felt good to be getting back into real code after months of toiling away and inane changes. I was surprised when the phone rang hours later. Picking up the pink shelled plastic phone I looked at the caller ID. Seeing Ben’s name and image I picked up and answered. “Hey, I almost have it.”

“I’m on my way home. Sorry it took me so long to call and get an update. I had to scramble to leave the conference.” Ben’s voice was rushed as you could hear him driving in the background.

“Leave the conference?” The confusion laced my voice as I thought over the situation. “Why? I’ll have this soon. I just need a couple of approvals and I can push to prod.”

“Don’t get the approvals. Wait for me to get home and I’ll mark the approval. Those consultants were close with the rest of the devs. We can’t be sure that they didn’t have anything to do with this. If I push to live then we can seal it off. Fuck…” Ben’s curse hung in the air before he spoke again. “This is gonna get messy. They are gonna want an after action, you are gonna need to write up how you found it. Fuck man, Melissa is gonna have to be on camera for this.”

I winced. There was no way I could prepare my wife for the situation. Her knowledge was enough to do the simple visual stuff I had been doing, but nowhere near the skill needed to pull off the complicated fix that I almost had ready to deploy. “Ben, let’s get through this and we can figure that part out later ok?”

“Thanks Missy.” I winced again as he used the name reflexively. He had begun calling me that even in personal interactions as a way to make sure he didn’t slip up in front of others in meetings. “I’ll message you when I get home and we can get this sorted.” He sounded ready to hang up before another thought occurred to him. “Oh, by the way Melissa is going to be in a shit mood when she gets home. TechCo is going R.T.O., so she is gonna have to go into the office effective Monday. They are bringing HR back in early to prepare for any issues. Whole company will be back by next month.”

The hits just kept on coming as I heard him detail the last thing my wife wanted. Suddenly, it dawned on me that she wasn’t the only one affected. “What about you?”

Ben laughed, the adrenaline in his body fading made it sound somewhat manic. “I just tendered my resignation. It isn’t worth it for me to go in. They offered severance for certain people, and since they decided to go another way with my promotion it just makes sense to switch my focus.”

“I’m sorry Ben. You should have gotten it. You really are a great manager. I’ll be a bit honest. I’m kinda glad, I really didn’t want to lose you here.” My opinions of Ben had risen while working with him. At first I had felt threatened by his and Melissa’s relationship, but over the months he had shown himself to be a strong and caring leader. The fact that he listened to my ideas and regularly implemented them was something I wasn’t used to in the industry. So most of the time my ideas had been ignored in favor of the status quo.

On the other end Ben had a small pang of regret. Darren really was a decent guy, too nice for a woman like Melissa really. It did help ease his remorse to know that when he had hooked up with Melissa the first time, he had not known she was with Darren. Shaking off the feeling, Ben spoke up. “Hey, I’m almost home. I’ll ping you and we can start working on our strategy for the meetings tomorrow.”

I nodded and hung up the phone. Setting it down, I dove back into the coding that I had promised Ben I would finish for him. Unseen was the blinking on my actual phone with messages from Melissa.