My Uncle's Best Friend

Charlie Where the hell are you? Mike’s on the warpath. You’re the target, by the way. Thanks, Stevie. I fire the phone back into my bag and barge through the glass doors of Dunley Tech, doused in the perfume of the London underground. Jackie, our darling receptionist, looks up from whatever influencer’s i********: she’s trying to imitate this week. She has packed so much powder on her face she looks like a cake. “Morning,” I nod curtly. “Wow” She drags her eyes from the screen. “Your skin looks really….” I raise my eyebrows, waiting. “Grey.” She went on. “Were you boozing last night?” “Thanks, Jackie,“ I replied, fumbling to find my security pass in my bag. “That’s almost as nice as when you asked me if I had washed my hair in conditioner. I was up until 3am sorting out the server outage if you must know. “ “Fascinating.” She turns back to i********:. “They have started without you. Mike’s raging. He says you better be ill or dead to be this late.” Damn. I look at my watch. It’s 10.20 already. Mike Chambers is our Head of IT., has been since the company started a decade ago. An absolute dinosaur in the workplace. He hates change and any ideas that don’t come from him. Greasy, uptight, and in desperate need of a good seeing to. We are sure he’s a 50-year-old virgin. I brace myself and push the doors of the boardroom open. It’s our weekly management meeting where the team sits through Mike’s d**k swinging with a slideshow in the background. He rants and stomps his feet for an hour while the rest of us patiently wait for the peacocking show to draw final curtains. Everyone has strategically chosen seats far from Mike. I walk to the only remaining seat right beside him. Great. I haven’t even had my own coffee yet; now I have to smell his rancid breath. “Sorry, Mike, I’m running late this morning.“ He leans over, breathing right in my face. If he comes any closer, I’m going to dry retch. “I can see that. We are discussing why the India office was offline for two and half hours last night. That meant thirty staff members were unable to do any work at all. Not one line of code written!” “I understand your frustration Mike -” I start. “That means horse s**t, Charlie.” He slams his fist down on the table, making the room wince. “Can you explain what happened here? Can you explain to the board why our most critical software release won’t be out in time?” He leans over the table, jutting his finger in my face. “Can you explain what the f**k went wrong?” I draw in a sharp breath and refrain from vomiting profanities at him. “It was a problem with the network again. As soon as I established the problem, we had a severity 1 call out. This was the fastest they would do it in.” “The fastest?” He scoffs. “Don’t be ridiculous. Who f****d up here? I. NEED. ANSWERS.” With every word, he jabs his finger on the table. He likes using his fingers for effect; we suspect he’s read it in a management for dummies or control your workforce book. “Contractually, they can take up to three hours for these types of problems. Those are our SLAs.” He blinks furiously. “How the f**k are you going to make sure it won’t happen again?” “We can't,” I reply through gritted teeth. “Unless you let me move us to a cloud solution, we’ll never have the resilience you want.” “Bullshit!” He howls. “We are not creating a bloody cloud, Charlie!” I open my mouth and close it again. I have drawn Mike basic diagrams, but the understanding wasn’t going in. “No, we don’t create the cloud,” I say slowly. “sss has already done that for us.” Mike was Head of IT but didn’t understand IT. To him, the software and hardware of a company should run by pressing a large red button with ‘Go’ on it. He couldn't understand why the button sometimes stopped working, and because of that, he got very mad. Very mad indeed. If there was a bug found in the Operating System, it was my fault. If the payroll software had bugs in its latest version, it was my fault. His printer running out of paper, my fault, his mate sending him an email that has a virus attached, my fault, and the company firewalls blocking his porn sites were all my fault. The last one was my fault. None of us took Mike seriously, but we had to go through the charade. After five years of dedication and hard graft, I had reached the roaring success of what you could call lower-middle management. Mike usually lets me get on with work without interfering because he doesn’t know what my job is. Only when the Directors came down heavy on him because of an IT problem did he rear his head and go on the warpath. I look around the table for support. Dana shrugs her shoulders. Tim discreetly picks his nose by pretending to remove fluff from his cheek. Everyone else is looking at their phones or out the window. I glance over at Stevie, who’s pushing his tongue into his cheek, doing the blowjob sign at me. Fuck off, I mouth back. Great bloody comradeship in this office. “Can we talk about the acquisition, please, Mike?” Tim interjects, breaking our standoff. Everyone sits up, interested. Mike shifts his weight between his legs and sucks in air like Tim had just said a naughty word. “They still can’t tell us who is buying the company?” Tim continues. “I heard it was one of the tech giants.” Mike's eyes dart around the room. He’s nervous. “I expect we won’t see any changes.” Translation: I have absolutely no f*****g idea. “Will our pay stay the same?” “Will our jobs stay the same?” “Can we still get the Costa coffee discount?” “Will there be redundancies?” Redundancies. s**t. I had ignored the topic of the company takeover this past few weeks. I’ll find out from Stevie what he knows. He raises his hands to quieten us. “As far as we are aware, it will be business as usual; nothing will change.“ There were a few murmurs. “There will be comms circulated throughout the company in the next day or two,” he says firmly. Comms. I hate that word. Comms, vision, strategy, strategic vision, all words that got Mike licking his lips. He says ‘there will be comms’ when he wants to shut us down, which means he’s no clue what is going on himself. Our barrel of questions is interrupted by a knock at the door. “Excuse me, Mike,” Jackie smiles with fake sweetness. “I have an important message for Charlie.” She looks sensational, but that’s because she uses the reception as a salon. Mike nods at her to continue. “It’s from your sister. She says it’s an emergency, and you must contact her immediately”. Oh god. My stomach heaves. This is bad. Someone’s dead. Dad’s dead. There’s been news from Ireland that he’s had a heart attack… or he finally overdosed on drink? No, Mum’s dead. Someone crashed into her when she was driving too slow. Both of them are dead. “That’s fine.” Mike waves his hand to dismiss me. I stand up shakily…be strong, Charlie. You must be strong for Callie. Although why does Callie know before me? Surely it should be the older sibling that delivers bad news? Why isn’t Tristan calling? Is there something wrong with Tristan? I follow Jackie out to reception, getting out my phone. Sure enough, there are 10 missed calls from Callie. s**t! “Did she say who it was about? Is it Dad?”I ask in a high pitch. She shrugs. “Not in my job description to ask.” Bitch. I grab the phone. “Callie?” I stammer. “What is it?” “Charlie!” She shouts over the noise of traffic. It sounds like she’s on a really busy road. I was right; Mum’s been in a car accident.