When she got there, there would be the initial meeting with Dar to find out what Alastair and she had promised as part of the contract. Kerry trusted her partner not to sell her down the river, but there were times when Dar would okay a concession if she thought the contract was important enough and then sometimes they scrambled.
This was an important contract. Not for the size of it, but for the visibility and the foothold it gave them in an area they hadn't really been that successful before now.
It tickled her to no end that she'd been a part of that win, even though she knew that it had been more pure luck than any real skill on her or Dar's part that had achieved it. Take truffles where you found them, Dar had said.
Yum. So she would. Kerry closed her eyes and relaxed her body, hearing the patter of leaves against the window and the soft creaks of the big house around her, until it lulled her into sleep.
DAR WAS GLAD enough to sleep in, spending most of the morning working off some of the mail overload that had built up in her inbox over the past few days. She was sprawled in the desk chair in her sleep shirt, the remnants of her breakfast tray nearby and a pot of coffee still handy.
It felt good to relax for a few hours. The trip had been very frenetic so far, and Dar appreciated the chance to sit back and get her act together before she had to meet with their new clients again. They had a meeting scheduled most of the afternoon, and then Alastair had arranged to host a dinner someplace in London for all of them.
Thursday, they'd meet with the local folks, hopefully all day to keep her mind occupied and off the fact that she'd be suffering the nine or ten hours of Kerry in the air and unreachable while she flew from Michigan through Chicago and then onward to London.
Of course, Dar realized she herself had been in the same state just the other day, but ever since Kerry's near miss in the storm, she'd found herself a nervous wreck whenever her partner flew. Kerry, on the other hand, had put the event in the past and didn't mind the travel and didn't seem to stress when Dar flew.
When they flew together, naturally, it didn't bother her. Dar decided not to think too much about why that was, and went back to her inbox instead. She clicked on a note from Mark, and opened it.
Hey boss!
Practice went good today. I think we'll do okay, so long as we don't have to do stuff like hit or catch softballs. So far, we're really good at wearing funny looking pants, and tripping on cleats.
We miss you guys. How's it going?
Mark.
Dar grimaced a little. She clicked on the little video embedded in the mail and waited for it to spool up, then watched as she got a Mark's eye view of two of her employees crashing full into each other and bouncing back at least four feet. "Nice."
She shook her head. "At least Ker and I won't be the worst ones out there. " She clicked on reply.
Hey Mark.
I hope the team can at least not knock each other over by the time Ker and I get back because if that's what's gonna happen we'll be laughing so hard we might as well just forfeit and go get drunk.
Meetings are going well--be ready to start this one up running because these people are skeptics. I hope that damn hub's going to come online soon because if there's one customer who's likely to push our SLA's to the limit it's this guy.
Throws decent meals though. We had prime rib of some creature or other for dinner and unlimited bottles of grog.
D
She went on to the next mail, glancing down at her news ticker piddling along at the bottom of her screen. "Slow morning." She flipped over to the network monitoring screen that always, from habit, ran in the background and she viewed the gauges she seldom saw at this hour of the Miami morning.
Nine o'clock in the morning here, four o'clock in the morning at home. She rested her chin on her fist, observing the traffic patterns. She could see the heavy usage fluttering across their internal networks both in Miami, and in the big data center in Houston. Backups, probably, unending streams of data being copied to their storage arrays, mirrored to make even that precaution redundant.
Dar respected that. She knew her team took the need to cover her ass very seriously, and she knew her peers in the company depended on that to make sure if something inevitably did happen, they could recover from it with no harm done.
A blinking blue light caught her attention, and she shifted her gaze to the Houston links, watching the big routers there chewing over a healthy size chunk of traffic, which she realized was the government financial data stream going through its nightly reconciliation.
Between the offices, the parallel tie lines were quiet. They didn't share much data, since Miami was the commercial hub and Houston the governmental one, but traffic like payroll and mail, corporate shares and intranet servers were quietly replicated so that the IT operation to most people was pretty much invisible.
Just how Dar liked it.
Just then, her messenger software popped up. Dar blinked at in surprise, half expecting it to be Kerry. It wasn't.
Ms. Roberts? Sorry to bother you.
Dar recognized one of their night net operators. No problem. She typed back. What's up?
We're having a little problem with the Niagara 3 node. We were going to call Mark but we saw you come online.
Dar cocked her head, marveling in the fact that the ops crew felt they could approach her now in so casual a manner. Respectful, but casual. She accessed a secure shell session and navigated through the net to the node in question, one of the three that surrounded the New York area to handle the stupendous amount of traffic there. Yeah? What's the problem?
We're seeing routes being injected and then squelched. We think it's a circuit issue but the local exchange up there swears no trouble found.
LECs lie like fish. Dar informed him. Let me take a look.
Node 3 was her newest, an interlink to Canada that had only been online a few weeks. She poked around in the router, pecking away happily at the device as she went through its configuration. She checked the logs, seeing nothing out of the ordinary, and then she went through all the interfaces one by one. Ah hah.
Ma'am?
Found it. Dar typed back. Give me a sec. She reviewed the flapping interface, a little surprised to find a timing mismatch coming in from one of their major service providers. She watched the errors for a minute, and then she experimentally changed a setting, watched, and then changed a second. The interface settled down and stopped its gyrations and after another minute the data commenced flowing normally.
It looks great now ma'am!
Dar smirked, and then cut and pasted the circuit information into her notepad and got out of the router. Anytime. She typed back. Now I have to go find out why the damn vendor changed his clocking without telling us.
So it wasn't the LEC?
Not this time. Dar confirmed. Service provider.
Well ma'am, sorry about that but you just won me a bet here, and now Chuck has to go out and get me Dunkin Donuts, so thanks!
Dar laughed out loud. She pasted the information into a new message, and addressed it to the vendor with a couple of snitty pecks and sent it on its way.