Mismatched

Ch. 24

As was becoming typical of my life, I didn't even make it to my second coffee of the day before shit had hit the fan.

I walked into Judy's store right on time (except that I was about ten minutes late, courtesy of Riley wanting ten more minutes of cuddles), fully expecting to get reamed out by Judy. She largely left me alone in the afternoon, but in the mornings she had been watching over me like a hawk. Almost like she was expecting me to fuck everything up (she probably was).

I was relieved when I didn't walk in to find Judy staring down the door with a scowl, but what I saw in front of me had me wishing that I was getting a lecture from Judy.

There was another guy sitting at the computer. My computer.

Had Judy found out and replaced me without saying anything just to spite me?

That thought seemed too good to be true. If Judy had found out, she would have made sure to get at least a few insults in.

He looked around my age, early twenties. He had silver-rimmed glasses that reminded me of Harry Potter. He was wearing a retro Atari graphic tee and charcoal black jeans that were ripped in the knee. In summary, extremely unprofessional.

I walked over to him and the computer, and he didn't even look up. I stood there, watching him. I loudly dropped my bag on the ground, which got his attention.

He looked over to me briefly, and I waved in a manner that would have probably been perceived as friendly if I didn't have such a murderous expression.

The guy pulled out his headphones, which I hadn't noticed under his soft, black hair. His hair was wispy and full, almost fluffy.

"What's up?" he asked, extremely casually, as if he wasn't sitting at my desk and touching my stuff.

"Who are you?"

"Oh, sorry, right. I'm Arty," he said. He extended a hand out for me to shake, and I took it tentatively.

"And what are you doing at my desk?"

"Well, I'm working on the computer, so I didn't have many options in terms of desk location," he drawled out sarcastically, which made me want to punch him.

But I couldn't punch him. At least, not until I had figured out exactly what he was doing, because this was seeming like it spelled bad news for me.

"And what are you working on?"

"Well, there was a small problem with the program reported. And I just had to come by to update the app on this ancient beast of a computer," Arty said, patting the old CPU as he spoke.

"What kind of problem?" I prodded further, and if Arty was getting annoyed, he wasn't letting on at all.

"It was allowing form submission with a null field," he said, his gaze steadily focussed back on whatever he was doing.

"In English?"

Arty blinked. "Right, sorry," he said.

Arty pulled up the program, showing me exactly what I didn't want to see. He pointed to the vacation question, the same one that had been the issue for Riley and Jack.

"If you don't enter a vacation, it still lets you continue. And it just messed things up, because it's expecting a result. I made this a few years ago and it has no error handling. Honestly, it's cringey to look at my old code but it seems to be serving its purpose."

"Wait, you made this?" I asked, perplexed.

"Yes?"

"But you look like you're like, what, twenty-two?"