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Chapter 38
Beatrice
Imadeapointof checking up on Papa by asking Hendrik how his dad was doing, even though he’d gone back to work.
He continued to help his dad regain his former outstanding muscle strength by first hounding him so that he ate well, and then by taking him to his gym in the late afternoons and having a personal trainer work with him. He made me laugh at his stories about how his father would grumble “how light the weights are that yourprofessional traineris making me lift, my son!”
I nearly laughed till I peed my pants the way Hendrik mentioned his frustration in one conversation. “Gadzooks, Beatrice! My father has to be the #1 hardest patient to take care of.Sufferin’ succotash! You'd think that he was the only one on the planet.Good grief, he’s a tough one!”
It was all I could do to contain my laughter at his adoption of my cussing. But I'm sure he heard the amusement in my voice, when I assured him, “Hendrik, my sweetness, you are a strong determined man!Great Guns! Don't let your father take advantage of you. Just tell him ‘horse feathers to that’ and make him do what he's supposed to do!” At that point, both Hendrik and I were doubled in laughter over the phone.
After a few sessions with the trainer and hours of working out, even Hendrik had to admit that his father's strength was back. His father was starting to demand that Hendrik go do his own workouts and leave him alone. That he didn't need a nursemaid. Blah blah blah.
And that's when Hendrik knew his father was out of the woods.
I’m at work and others on my team are huddled together around their morning cold caffeine. There is scuttlebutt, some office gossip, that Jeff, my no-tech boss, is moving out of his position.
Moving or being moved?
I wonder. We’ve been doing great work inspiteof his management. So what’s really going on?
Joseph and the others on my team have just heard this rumor. I see that the others are satisfied but wary because if the company could put someone as bad as Jeff as a manager, what kind of professional—if any—would they assign next?
We all go back and forth on this before getting back to work. We agreed to join each other for coffee after work and compare any news we can drum up before then.
At coffee this evening, Joseph and a couple of other team members talk about this shift in supervisors by saying to each other, “Oh, we want the All-Seeing-Eye as boss.”
“Guys,she’sright here.” I point to myself. “The All-Seeing-Eye is Hearing All, too, you know.” They all chuckle at my mock outburst.
Then the two hair-brained coders Craig and I had set straight looked at each other and waggled their eyebrows comically. Joseph saw it and demanded to know what they had learned. The one I had dubbed Red because that was the only color he wore, says, “Well, some of the men always wondered, but we heard twice this afternoon that Jeff … Well that Jeff probably slept not to the top, but to the middle—by sleeping with the Director of Projects.” Red pauses dramatically.
When no one reacted or said one word when he mentioned the DoP, he threw out both arms and said, “People! The Director of Projects is a man. Lest you forget, if Jeff slept his way to the middle by sleeping with the Director of Projects, wouldn't that make one or both of them gay, or at least bisexual?”
Well, Red got the reaction he wanted. None of us were thinking along those lines. None of us really cared about anyone else's sex life. Quite frankly, I had enough to think about with my own, so worrying about who was or wasn't sleeping with whoever else wasn’t on my horizons.
Red’s sidekick, the other coder I called Floppy because of his long unruly curly hair (longer than my own hair and crazier, too), jumped in then. He’d heard that there was a big argument in the DoP’s office mid-week last week. Just by lurking around and casually asking “if things had calmed down yet at the DoP’s,” he found out that it might just have been a lovers’ spat followed by a noisy breakup between the DoP and … Jeff.
Who knew that Jeff might be gay? None of us ever considered the matter. It just wasn’t important.
Until his love affair went bust and affected our team.
Chapter 39
Hendrik
Wewereatherplace after a leisurely dinner and Beatrice mentioned the supervisory change once it was no longer a rumor but officially announced.
Outwardly, I shrug and harumph every so often, basically just listening to her tell me how the news came to the team and how they’d confirmed the rumor.
Meanwhile, my head is going a mile a minute.
From what I know about Beatrice’s skills and reputation, she'd be a natural to lead the team. They do call her the All-Seeing-Eye.
And geeks take such monikers seriously. We are all so wound up in our own cyber world that it takes an exceptional person to shake us up and make us pay attention.
Beatrice obviously has done that.
I looked at her with new eyes.
