The Golden Carrot
Taking a swig of beer, Bleep slammed the empty glass down and switched his voice, imitating Reg’s well perfected sales purr, a vocal trick I’d heard him perform many times before, but previously only so accurately with Sean Connery and Roger Moore:
“Look, Babyface, I’m not taking ‘no’ for an answer, you’re the best developer we have. You breezed 4, 8 and 16, so 24 is easily within your grasp. I know you have the skill and determination, so what’s the problem?”
“Speed,” replied Bleep, switching his posture and deftly answering his own question in Babyface’s pre-pubescent tones.
“Very good!” said I. “You’re quite the wicked impersonator when you get going.”
“You wait til later, when you appear!” winked my pal, returning to his act.
“Speed,” reiterated Babyface. “It’s all to do with speed.”
“You told Ronnie you’d given that up,” swerved Reg.
“I mean there isn’t a server fast enough to keep up,” snapped Babyface irately. “I’ve done all the calculations.”
“Let’s use 3 servers then.”
“That was a one off.”
“What about 5?” asked Reg, undeterred. “Or 10? Name your configuration and we’ll do it.”
“Reg, it’s not a hardware issue, this is all about the software – it simply isn’t up to it. We’ve got patches on our patches as it is. We need a complete rewrite to stand a chance, and that’ll take months.”
“A month you say? Get to it then. As I’m such a brilliant boss, let’s call it a round 25 days.”
“You have to be kidding! I’m not doing any more bodges or half arsed splatches. Enough is enough, my foot is down.”
“Right, that’s it. I’m cutting your pay by a grand for insolence.”
“You can’t do that.”
“Now it’s two grand, for insolence AND wasting my time.”
“I quit.”
“Make that three grand, for insolence, time wasting and cowardice.”
“You can’t do that. I just quit.”
“A three grand pay cut, to be restored as a three grand raise when you deliver Petrollica. And as a special bonus, I’ll give you the photographs plus negatives from the company trip to Amsterdam. You must remember your entwining encounter with the masked python woman of Tripoli? Ah. I can see from your face that you forgot.”
“You wouldn’t.”
“I’m sure you’ll enjoy the rediscovery. Along with your fiancé.”
“Now you’re bluffing.”
“Clubbus Eroticus. Babyface meets the porno rhino. Oh, I see, you forgot about that too. Make Petrollica work, or the photos go to the Sunday Sport. The editor is a personal friend of mine. I can see the headline now, ‘son of a…’”
“…You can’t fool me. I don’t believe you’d do that, not for a second.”
“You better. An empty threat is like a bald hedgehog – laughable and quite, quite pointless.”
Bleep opened his wallet and produced a folded page from the Sunday Sport, showing a topless bloke on all fours twisted into a rather revealing pose with an uninhibited snake goddess, replete with erotic back tattoos, a black rectangle obscuring his face. Despite the attempted black-out, the curl of unruly hair poking out above the black gave the identity of its owner away in an instant. For once, Reg was telling the truth.
Bleep shook his head. “Babyface’s family and fiancé were threatened with total embarrassment unless he did the business.”
“What did he do?”
“What could he do?”
The baby-faced one set to like the grizzled old pro he’d become, patching patches on patches, bodging bodges on bodges and frigging the frigs that had historically been applied to a load of other frigs. By the time he’d finished, the product stunk like the outhouses at a French glue factory and what came out of development at the end of that stint was most unsavoury. It might have worked well enough to the untrained eye, and splitting the input queues over 6 servers and the output queues over another 6 solved the throughput problem, but it wasn’t the twenty four seven solution the client was expecting. Babyface didn’t care by this point, he was mentally wasted from all the late nights and early mornings; all he wanted was his photos and once they were in his shaky little mitts, he was planning to be off to the Far East in a cloud of dust, for a nice long Thai-stick induced relax in the sun.
“Did he get them?”
“Hell, no. Reg had never seen Babyface so motivated and on it. He wasn’t about to surrender his newly discovered golden carrot, not without properly wearing it out first.”
The Ferret Files 
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