“You really have no idea what you’re doing, do you?” Then he sneered, “You must give good head or something.”
“Excuse me?”
“Yeah, you’ve gotta be slobbing somebody’s knob. Because there’s no other explanation for how someone as incompetent as you are can manage to keep this job.”
My cheeks burned. Even though I knew Josh was a moron, even though I knew everything he said was total trash, that glare he was giving me made me feel inferior. Like maybe I actually didn’t deserve this job.
In a flash, I came to my senses. Because Josh had no idea I knew what he was up to. No clue that I was thinking two steps ahead of him. After all, I was just a girl who must’ve sucked someone’s dick to get a shitty job at the help desk. A girl who could never outwit a Hatchling.
Well, fuck him.
“I know what you’ve been doing,” I said, low and ominous.
He sucked his teeth. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“I think you know what I’m talking about.” We stared at each other, not saying a word. Soon enough, his brow twisted in confusion, and I realized he really didn’t know what I was talking about. So, I clued him in. “You need to stop going to all those shady websites.”
“I’m not going to any shady websites.”
“Stop lying, Josh.”
His voice grew louder. “I’m not lying.”
Clearly, Josh wasn’t going to listen to me unless I provided irrefutable proof of his offenses. Which is why it was a good thing I’d never actually uninstalled that keylogger.
I snatched the laptop from his hands. Two quick taps of the trackpad and the keylogger interface filled the screen. An organized record of everything he’d done on this laptop for the past week and a half, on full display. Things he’d never thought anyone would see.
For once, Josh Brewster was speechless. But I still had a lot to say.
“Do you think we can’t track everything you do on this computer?” I asked.
He squinted, trying to make sense of what was going on. I could hear the squeak of rusty gears turning inside his head. All this thinking was hard for poor Josh.
Taking pity on him and his feeble powers of deduction, I decided to walk him through the features of the keylogger. “Here’s a record of everything you did on this computer last night. See, this is where you disabled the virus scanner. And here’s where you visited a website called GiganticAsses.xxx. It says you spent about fifteen minutes there before heading over to PokerParty.com. Two hours later, you deleted your browser history, and then turned the virus scanner back on.”
Finally, understanding dawned on his face. “You’re spying on me?”
“Very perceptive.”
“That’s illegal.”
“Oh, but it’s not.”
I stood up and pulled a thick stack of pages from the cabinet above my desk. The other day, after Bob had told me to wipe the keylogger from Josh’s laptop, I’d pulled a copy of the Hatch Code of Conduct from our corporate intranet, and reviewed the section titled Company Resources. In the second paragraph, I found the following statement:
All members of the Hatch community, including full-time employees, part-time employees, contractors, and Hatchlings, shall use company resources only for legitimate business purposes. This includes, but is not limited to, Hatch-issued mobile phones and electronic devices, such as laptops and desktop computers. Hatch retains the right to monitor usage of said devices to ensure adherence to company policy at all times.
In other words, Bob was wrong. What Josh did on his own time on a Hatch-issued laptop wasn’t his own business. Installing a keylogger wasn’t against company policy. I’d been right all along.
I had printed out the whole Code of Conduct, all eighty-five pages of it. Then I highlighted the section on the use of company resources, as well as a number of pertinent passages about Hatch’s policies against pornography, gambling, and offensive stickers. Now, I presented these to Josh, pointing to the sentences marked with neon yellow lines.
“See?” I said. “It says it right there. And there. And there.”
He sputtered like a malfunctioning engine. I couldn’t hide the satisfaction I felt, putting this jerk in his place, watching him struggle to find a rebuttal.
“You’re not gonna get away with this,” he said. What a sad attempt at a threat. As if he was capable of plotting some brilliant revenge. He couldn’t even hide his porn consumption properly.
“It’ll take me a couple of hours to fix this,” I said, casually ignoring his threatening remark. “Just leave it here and I’ll—”
“I’m not leaving this here, you crazy bitch.”
With one beefy hand, he slapped the cover of his laptop closed and snatched it away. And then he was gone.
Too bad I didn’t know how old he was or where he lived. If I did, I’d have logged him on JerkAlert as a precaution. Don’t date him, girls. He’s a raging sexist douchebag. Also, painfully stupid.
Regardless, I decided to check in and see how my baby was doing. According to the dashboard, I’d had over a hundred new visitors overnight, half of whom had logged new entries in the database. Profiles now numbered well into the thousands. Things were looking up.
Except for one tiny problem. The performance monitor on the server showed increasing signs of slowness: backlogged requests, delayed responses, pages that took forever to load. From a coding standpoint, I’d done all I could do to address performance. The only solution was to upgrade my hosting plan. Which I couldn’t do until I got some more cash.
Out of desperation, I pulled up my existing code, searching for weaknesses I might have overlooked. Maybe a minor tweak somewhere could help the pages load a little bit faster.
I became so engrossed in my work, I didn’t hear Alex sidle into my cubicle.
“Melanie.”
At the sound of his voice, I shrieked and startled, spinning around to see him standing there, looking dapper as always.
“You okay?” he asked.
“Yeah. Yeah, totally fine.”
He looked past me, at the computer screen. “What’re you up to?”
“Nothing.” My hand fumbled for the mouse, clicking furiously to close the working window.
“Are you coding something?”
“No. I mean, nothing interesting. Just some scripts to push out next Tuesday’s updates.”
It’s not like he could tell I was working on JerkAlert. From his vantage point, the words on my screen were tiny and unintelligible. It could’ve been any programming language, for any piece of software.