AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I blink. “Okay.” Surely Liam must have called him.
“This is Finn,” he says, pointing at the man in jeans. “You may know him from our IT team.”
“Hi,” I say to Finn. “I think I’ve talked to you about the website before.”
He nods back.
“Finn found something interesting when he went into our email servers a little while ago,” Donald tells me. “Your email finally bounced back.”
“What?” I ask, confused.
“Maybe Finn can explain,” Donald suggests. I turn to look at him and he nods.
“There’s ah… different kinds of bounces. Soft bounces and hard bounces,” he says. “Hard bounces usually get sent back to the server right away. You’ve probably seen them before. You’ll get an email undeliverable message in your inbox.”
“Yes, I’ve had some of those. But I didn’t get one for this,” I tell him.
“No,” he agrees. “Which is weird, because it’s actually a hard bounce, but it came through like a soft bounce.”
I’ve no idea what he’s talking about or what this means for me, but I nod anyway, encouraging him to continue.
“A soft bounce happens when the recipient’s inbox is full or the server is down. Either way, we get information explaining why something bounces.” His eyes light up, as though he’s talking about his very favorite thing. “It’s called an SMTP reply but you probably don’t need to know that.” He smiles, embarrassed. “It tells us why something bounces, and then our servers can use that information to decide whether to resend or to block that email account.”
“So my email bounced?” I say. “Does that mean that BTV never received it?”
“Pretty much.” Finn nods. “But I’m still confused because it looks like a hard bounce acting like a soft bounce.”
I’m still clueless. So is Donald and the legal team by the looks of it, but this is good news, right?
“Does that mean that BTV doesn’t have the email?”
“That’s correct,” Finn says. “It’s as though it never arrived. Which I guess it didn’t if it’s a hard bounce.” He frowns. He’s confusing himself.
“So what happens now?” I ask.
“Well obviously the email is deleted so our server will never try to resend,” he says. “But BTV definitely has some kind of problem, because their email server is whacked. Emails shouldn’t act like that.”
I can’t really bring myself to care about the competition’s email server. Not when their failure means I haven’t given any of our secrets away. “That’s good news, right?”
“It’s wonderful news,” Donald says. “Obviously that means we’d like you back at work right away.” He clears his throat. “And maybe you can let the crowd outside know that you still have your job.”
I let out a mouthful of air. “So that’s it?” I ask. “It’s over?”
“Well, I’ve also managed to get ahold of the person responsible for receiving the weather hub submissions. They’ve agreed to look at ours if you email it over before the end of the day. Can you do that?”
“Yes I can.” I nod. “I’ll just need my laptop.”
“Monica left it in your office. In your top drawer.”
“Thank you,” I say gruffly.
“Well that’s it,” Donald says, standing. “It’s been a long day and I’m sure everybody would like to get home. Finn, Charles, Robert, thank you for your time.” They shake my hand and file out, leaving me and Donald in the boardroom alone.
“Ah, while you’re here, I’ve had some reports about the weather team being extremely understaffed,” Donald says. “I’m going to look into that tomorrow. I wonder if you’d be available to talk about that as well as a possible restructuring of the team?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Good, good.” He holds his hand out. “Thank you. And if you could make sure everybody comes inside before it’s time for the evening broadcast I’d be very grateful.”
