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“We both know it doesn’t always go that way.”
“No fucking joke.”
We’re quiet for a minute until Carter interrupts the silence. “Are you going to be okay, Smoky?”
“Yeah, I am. Thank you for distracting me for a bit, though.”
“I’d do anything for you.”
CHAPTER 23
Carter
Ifinish typing up the monthly agenda at the same time William comes into the office. I usually have this finished before our meeting, but this week got away from me. All the projects I’d been pushing off to focus on the database crept up on me, and this fell off my radar until I realized last night that I had to be in Greensboro today.
Instead of typing it last night, I talked with Sam after the fire. When he finally opened up about what happened, I was heartbroken. I hated hearing how sad he was about that little girl. The silver lining is she won’t remember what happened, not that the trauma won’t shape the rest of her life, regardless.
“I just sent out the agenda. Sorry for not getting it to you sooner,” I say once William is sitting at the table.
“No big deal. We’ve all been busy catching up now that the database is about finished.”
Paul and Inez come in at the same time with coffee mugs in their hands. Eliza follows behind them a minute later, and I start the meeting as soon as everyone is settled.
“Eliza, how are the final checks coming on the database?”
“So far, so good. Everything seems to have been righted, and we should be good to go next week to test with real data.”
I nod. “Great. I need to follow up with Tom on who the higher-ups want to test it out first.” I make a note in my agenda to set up some time with my boss. “William, can you update us on your projects?”
He goes into the bug fixes he’s been working on, as well as a pet project he started after he found the database errors. “I think this tracking method could really help us streamline the updates we make while we code. Imagine how much time we could save knowing exactly where we last updated something.”
“That would be great. I could’ve used something like this while I tried to figure out where we went wrong on the database.”
“You still digging?” William asks.
I shake my head. “Not really. Tom doesn’t care, and we’ve got too many other things going on now that were put off because of the database.” I turn to Paul. “Any updates on the security side? I saw you were meeting with the heads to integrate their system with the database.”
“Yeah, that went well. I think they’re looking forward to having their notes all in one place and searchable,” Paul responds.
“I bet. It’ll make their jobs easier, to say the least. Anything else going on?”
He shakes his head.
“Inez, have you had any other issues with the scoring program errors?”
“Maybe? I found something weird. I’m not sure if it means anything, but I thought I’d bring it up anyway. The osteoporosis team called me the other day because they were having scoring issues again. At first, it was just simple data entry error, so I was able to get it worked out over the phone. Then they called a second time for the same program, and I decided to just go up there. I ended up finding that a setting had been turned on that was making their data look weird, but that’s not the point. When I looked to find if the program needed an update, I realized RetLab had been updated in February.”
“I didn’t realize they’d updated the program. Could that have been our issue in the database?”
She shakes her head. “I asked the same question, so I looked it up. The most recent update was in October.”
“It shouldn’t be possible for someone to just go in and fix the code, though. Those programs are protected from alterations, right?”
“I thought so. The time stamp indicates that’s not so true.”
“Okay, I’ll check into it. Thanks for your due diligence, Inez.”
We use the rest of our time to brainstorm some fixes for William’s tracking program. All the while, my brain is stuck on how it could be possible for someone to change the scoring program and why they would even want to. Wouldn’t that ruin the data you’re entering?
