The Internship (Stuart Twombly)

Chapter 3

"Good morning interns! Today marks the first of several challenges through which your team will show their merits."

The team was gathered around a set of three computers all displaying the same video simultaneously. The first challenge instructions were being read aloud by Chetty while Stuart laughed in his head. It was going to be a little hard to show the team's 'merits' with those two overly-confident middle aged men, he thought.

"While internally dogfooding a new product, a number of Googlers reported a bug that disabled their audio. All two million lines of that code are in the source files. Your job: find the bug."

"Okay, we should check the user reports." Neha declared as the team rushed to their computers.

"Scan the logs for any red flags." Juliette suggested.

"See what exceptions were thrown." Stuart himself put in.

"I always start by drawing up strategies to sift through the code."

"Code, right? Code, right. Codes." Billy started talking.

"Right." His best friend answered.

"So at the end of the day, we're looking to kind of break the password here, right?

"Maybe the answer's in the question."

"Maybe it's something with 'bug'!"

"Eureka!"

"Bug like fly."

"The Fly."

"Is Chetty a cinephile?"

"Goldblum."

"Goldblum!"

"Boggles my mind that no one has a notebook out." Nick exasperated. "You guys are writing gibberish. Maybe that's helpful, maybe it's not. But I can guarantee you what we're saying is helpful!"

"Guys! We're looking for a bug, not a password. They're different things." Lyle declared. Stuart shook his head, annoyed. If he thought the two dumbasses were bad, he was obviously underestimating. He looked to his right where Juliette was seated, writing writing on the board frantically wearing the same miffed expression. He couldn't help but notice how just plain adorable her thinking face was, but immediately shook the thought as soon as he thought of it.

"Keep going with that human connection. Stay positive."

The two older men started yelling things that had absolute no relevance to the situation and were if anything dragging the team down.

"We'll go on fly, 'cause that's where we're at," Stuart glanced up at the imbecile of a man who was obliviously using a Sharpie instead of a dry-erase marker and babbling on about insects. "and we're flying it; we're right here."

"Fly, fly. Write that. I know we're buzzing around it."

"Zzz, Y-L-F, and it's a word scramble, and it's life."

"For some reason, I can't get 'fly' out of my head, and now I'm going Lopez. Jennifer Lopez. Is it a fly girl?"

The team was beyond fed up with their antics. Everyone wore an angered expression and obviously wanted nothing more than for a train to come and hit the two.

"'Superfly'. Pop fly. Uh, excavation. Earthquakes. California."

"That's it! Write that down!" Billy shouted.

"Where? Where?"

"Do it, do it, write it down, type it in!"

"What am I doing?!"