Losing Everything

Chapter 10.15

There were all sorts of reasons why Erica might be going to say no, and it really didn’t matter which of them it was, not to Lucy. What mattered was that suddenly this was awkward. It was terribly awkward for both of them. Everything had changed since they last worked together, and Lucy had momentarily forgotten that. She had just assumed her help would be useful, because in the past it would have been. In the past, she had always been the talented one, the one who could look at a problem and point to a line of code and say, “Fix that bit there.”

In the past, Erica would probably have wanted her help, but now everything had changed and Lucy kept forgetting that.

Now, Erica was going to turn Lucy down, and was only having trouble deciding how to say so politely. It was going to be mortifying for both of them, so quickly, before it became even more awkward than it already was, Lucy said, “Actually, don’t worry.”

Erica looked relieved. Just for a moment. Then she said, “Lucy, I…”

“No,” Lucy said. “I shouldn’t have asked. I’m sorry.”

“Why…?” Erica said.

“It’s really fine. I get it.”

“Lucy…”

“Just forget I asked, okay?”

“Stop talking,” Erica said. “Fuck.”

Lucy stopped.

“It’s not why you think,” Erica said. “I promise. It’s just that this all mature software, that’s all. There isn’t very much code to look at, and what there is, it’s stable. There’s hardly anything to fix.”

“You’ve been working all morning…” Lucy said, uncertainly. “There must be…”

“Yeah, support stuff. Explaining to new people how to use it, mostly.”

“Oh.”

“It’s stable. And it’s audited crypto code, too. So I can’t just go tweaking stuff everywhere in case I break the actual cryptoness…”

Lucy nodded. That made sense. And as well, when there was a bug, something which needed fixing, Erica having written everything herself meant that explaining to someone else where to look for a problem would probably take her just as long as simply fixing it herself.

“I spend most of my time doing support,” Erica said. “There’s really not much coding to do any more.”

“Oh,” Lucy said, losing interest.

“Yeah,” Erica said, looking at her. “Exactly.”

“What?”

Erica shook her head.

“No,” Lucy said, confused. “What are you…?”

“I remember how you are,” Erica said. “And I really don’t think you doing support for me is a good idea…”

Lucy remembered too. She remembered enough that she could guess what Erica meant. Lucy had always been a little impatient with people who didn’t understand things right away. Not rude, and not angry, and not even actually impatient with the people themselves, not really, as much as with her own inability to explain in a way they understood. She got impatient, though, and her impatience often showed, and the difference between being impatient with someone and being impatient because she couldn’t explain was often lost on the person she was talking to.

In the end, at Bitmo, she had stopped doing support calls unless she could talk directly to a tech person at the client’s site. And so now, she was fairly sure she knew exactly what Erica meant.

“Yeah,” Lucy said. “I suppose not.”