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“It would take months to create evenoneside-chain that could scale this way,” he said. “Years to finish the forty-three cryptocurrencies we currently support.”
I gave him a funny look. “Months? It wouldn’t be very hard at all. The core code is simple, especially on token-based currencies.”
Edoardo turned to the two men sitting next to him and said something loud enough for everyone to hear. Several men laughed. One gasped. The sole woman in the room clenched her jaw in obvious annoyance.
He just insulted me.
“What did he say?” I asked the interpreter.
He glanced at me, hesitating.
Furio stepped out of his corner of the room, dangerous like a wolf. He began speaking to Edoardo in Italian, reprimanding him with obvious anger, but I shot out a hand and told him to wait. Furio paused, then nodded at me.
“What,” I asked the interpreter again, “did he say?”
The interpreter cleared his throat and didn’t look at me as he answered. “He said you American women think you know everything. Any real programmer knows this would take a month, minimum. He suggested you are only in this role at your company because… You arefriendlywith the new boss. But he did not sayfriendly. He used a more vulgar word which I am not comfortable translating.”
My cheeks suddenly felt like they were on fire. Edoardo stared up at me defiantly. I glanced at Furio, who was glaring at Edoardo like he was ready to fire the man on the spot. Part of me wanted to let him do it, to have the man dragged out of the room and thrown on the street.
But I knew they wouldn’t respect me if that happened. Then it would be averylong four days here ateTodo. I needed to solve this myself.
I grabbed Edoardo’s laptop. He grasped for it, but couldn’t stop me in time. I saw that he had Notepad++, a coding program, open and connected to theeTodocode repository. Good. A projector was hanging from the ceiling, and I connected the laptop to the cable until my screen was visible on the wall.
“A month?” I said to Edoardo, and made myself chuckle.
He said something condescending, but I didn’t listen to the translation. Already my fingers were flying over the keys, beginning to code out a solution. My anger added emphasis to every keystroke as I declared my variables and got to work.
Everyone watched, but their stares weren’t bothering me now. I was too angry to feel awkward. This man was an asshole, and I had to prove him wrong. And I was going to do it in front of everyone who worked for him.
After ten minutes, I had eight pages of code. At half an hour, I was at nineteen. Sweat pooled between my shoulder blades from the warmth of the projector behind me, but I ignored it. I was in a groove and didn’t want to pause, even to adjust my shirt.
A few of the coders began whispering to each other, pointing up at the screen. Discussing the code. Edoardo continued scowling at me, and he made a few more insulting comments to the men next to him, but now they weren’t laughing. They were gazing up at my stream of code with curiosity and awe. Edoardo began to sweat.
Loops and functions and new variables poured from my fingertips into the program. I didn’t know all of theeTodocustom schema, so I created temporary pointers that could be filled in later. Right now I just needed to complete the majority of the work, the outline to prove that it could be done far more easily than they thought.
At the forty-five minute mark, I pulled my hands away from the laptop and leaned back in my chair. The room was silent, although most of the employees were smiling at the solution I had just created.
I slid the laptop back around to Edoardo. “If it takes you months to do what thisAmerican Womanjust did in under an hour, then you’re really bad at your job.”
From across the room, Furio smiled broadly at me as the interpreter translated my victorious words.
43
Amber
“The look on his face,” Furio said that evening. “I thought he was going to have a stroke!”
We were sitting at a small table for two outside a restaurant in the middle of the city, sharing a bottle of wine while waiting for our food to arrive. The sun was beginning to fall somewhere beyond the ancient-feeling buildings to my left, spreading an orange Roman sunset across the sky above. The Pinot Noir in my glass tasted better than any wine I’d ever had in my life, and I knew that was partially because of my victory ateTodotoday.
“Andyoulooked like you were going to fire Edoardo,” I said. “Out of a cannon. Into the sun.”
“I still may do so,” he replied gravely. “What he said about you, and about me, is unacceptable.”
“I’m glad you let me put him in his place, first,” I said. “The look on his face after I did his job for him? It was priceless.”
Furio rolled his wine stem between his fingertips. “And now everyone there will respect you the way I respect you.”
I dipped my head in his direction and sipped my wine. Part of the reason I felt so good about today’s events was that Furio was there to witness it. I desperately wanted his approval, I realized. Getting it made me feel like I had already finished the entire bottle by myself rather than just a few sips.
