Darkness in the Brightest Day - Part 1

Getting to work

The warm winds howled all Sunday night.  By Monday morning, most of the leaves were ripped off the trees.  The ground was desiccated and the plants were wilting.  The infamous Santa Ana winds had come to Southern California as they did every fall and always left the landscape parched, damaged, and littered with debris.  The most practical problem was the layer of dust on the windshield of Jake's car.  Jake Martinez was 24 years old and lived with his parents in their small house in the northern part of Los Angeles, California in a community called Sunland.  The garage was reserved for his father's car.  Jake's car didn't get the garage and he was left to compete for a place among the limited spaces on his neighborhood's street.  He didn't have enough time to clean the windows.  It was 6:35 and he needed to get to work.  He was grateful when his old Mercury Mystique started without hesitation.  He drove through the litter strewn streets leading to the 210 freeway.  As he drove east, the rising sun made it difficult to see the lines ahead through the glare of the dusty windshield but he slipped on his sunglasses and managed the unpleasant 20 mile drive to work.

By 7:15 he was at his desk, ready to start the day as a computer programmer in a government office near Pasadena.  Checking his email, he discovered that there was a computer application outage going on.  He sighed. Emails were flying back and forth between the server administrators, application developers, and database administrators.  Frustration abounded and complaints were plentiful, "The developers must have pushed out a buggy change that crashed the server." "The server's not down, just IIS."  "No, Oracle is down.  Reboot the HP servers."  Though there was nothing he could do about it, Jake offered what insight he had to the server administrators.  It turned out he had made a lucky guess.  The administrators were able to correct the problem and the systems came back up.

He turned his attention to his copious emails and attempted to get through them.  Some people were having trouble with the system he had developed to track mobile phone bills.  It turned out the system had double generated the bills.  By the time he figured out that something was wrong, he heard feet coming up to his cubicle.  It was his boss, Mr. Ramm.  "Good morning, Jake.  I just got an email telling me that customers are confused by getting multiple copies of their bills. What are we doing about this?"

Jake removed the extra records from the database and sent out an email explaining the malfunction and apologizing for the inconvenience.  He was concerned that in removing the extra records he might remove some good ones also but there were no further complaints. The day slowly went on.  He met with employees representing various sections of the agency wanting enhancements to their systems.  They had unrealistic expectations of what could be done and impossible deadlines but he handled them all with courtesy and patience.  He assisted other people who were having problems with the systems he supported.  He tried to be cheerful and was, by and large, successful.  His boss expressed appreciation and he allowed himself to hope that one day he would be promoted to Senior Application Developer.  He imagined what it would be like to get a bigger cubicle and more pay.  The day was long but finally it came to an end.  Jake drove back up the 210 freeway into the glow of the sunset.  Tomorrow he would do it all again.