Corporate Punishment

Nothing ever goes smoothly

He knew something was wrong when he walked in the door from the way the receptionist looked at him. When he got close to the conference room, he could hear Whitney and Sally yelling. He didn't make it in the door when Sally screamed at him, "What the hell did you do to all the files for the deployment?"

He looked from Sally to Whitney, who was half irate and half panicked. "What do you mean? They were all there yesterday when we left the office."

"Yes, and now they are all gone?"

Sam rushes to the shared computer to find the directory was empty. "Shit. I didn't look when we got here. I wonder when they got deleted."

"You mean when you deleted them." Sally glowers at him. Sam looks up at her and has trouble reading her face.

"I didn't delete them. I hadn't even logged on to the computer today. What about the ones on the backup server?"

Sally growls. "Gone."

"And the ones that I emailed you?"

"You never emailed me the files."

Sam thought he could detect a bit of smugness in her tone. "I could have sworn that I did." Sam walks to his backpack and sees that it has been moved. "I never trust technology. It is always too easy to have things get messed up." He opens it and flips through several compartments until he gets to a pocket in a pocket and pulls out a thumb drive. "I brought a couple other backups, in case something happened." He hands it to Sally. "This has everything on it as of when we left Friday evening."

"How convenient for you to have brought this."

Ms. Lawrenceson speaks for the first time. "I don't know if it was planned, or just convenient, but at least this means we can still do the launch on time. Please do a quick review of them and get them to my IT people in the next few minutes."

Sally responds quickly, "I don't know if we can review them all in time. We should push back the launch until tomorrow."

Whitney spins on her heel and looks Sally dead in the eye. "Either you have them validated and in my IT groups hand in 10 minutes or I'll be on the phone with Macy telling her how her team is incompetent and that I'm breaking our contract with them and I will want compensation for the cost of this project, as well as any lost revenue over the next six months. Do you understand?"

Sam can hear Sally swallow. "Yes, Ms. Lawrenceson."

Sam has the thumb drive in the computer and is pulling up the files before Whitney leaves the room. The next seven minutes are tense and quiet as they scan through the dozen documents, checking to see if they had the last changes that were made on Friday. Once they had verified them the best they could, Sally emailed them to the IT contact, and Sally left with the thumb drive to drop it off personally.