It Only Too Twenty Years

Revised 4/6/2024

Notes for the reader:

This tale was our first submission to Literotica. The date isn't accurate because we combined multiple chapters together into larger parts to reduce the number of clicks needed to read it. It was easier to simply replace it all, and thus the Lit moderators counted the revision as a new submission.

As it was our first submission, it was a bit over the top (to put it mildly) compared to our later stories. We've toned things down a lot as time has passed.

We hope you enjoy:

It Only Took Twenty Years

Chapter 1: Prologue

If I remember correctly, I first met her on January 10, 1995, her first day on the job (after new employee orientation, that is). It was barely six months after my own first day.

We were employed at the same Fortune 500 technology company as IT professionals. I began my career after graduating from a Midwestern university. She'd already been employed for a few years at a large defense contractor after graduating from an east coast university.

I was a bit smitten the first time I met her.

To set a little context, I was, and still am, a totally ordinary, boring guy. I was born to two phenomenally supportive and loving parents as the youngest of three children, all (including said parents) born in Oklahoma where I lived for three years before the family relocated to western Texas for eleven years before being redirected again (due to my father's promotion to the Midwest territory manager of his company) to a St. Louis suburb for the next nine years.

For the last four of those, I attended a highly regarded science and engineering university and graduated

magna cum laude

with a bachelor's degree in computer sciences. To complete the description, I'll add I'm still the six-foot two-inch one-hundred seventy-five-pound guy with blondish brown hair and brown eyes with which this story begins.

Despite being aggressively scouted by the United States Department of Defense and the Central Intelligence Agency, both of which told me during interviews that I could never discuss any details of my work with anyone not employed by the same, IBM, Motorola, Intel, American Airlines, BNSF, and several others, I decided to accept an offer from a high-tech company based in Dallas, Texas.

A few years after joining its workforce, I availed myself of my employer's very generous tuition reimbursement program and began working toward my master's degree. She did, too. We attended at least half our classes together.

During the first few years of our employment, she and I had a number of opportunities to work closely together, but not as many as I'd have liked, as there were more than fifty network specialists employed by the company back then.

I was sent on a three-week assignment in Houston to wrap up a nine-month project involving a complete network infrastructure upgrade at our second-largest Texas campus. Its coaxial 10Base5 network, and the associated truckloads of transceivers and repeaters, were torn out. Thousands upon thousands of meters of category-three twisted pair cable and new 10BaseT NIC cards or TPAUs were installed in or on all the desktop computers and manufacturing tools. Hundreds of employees scored new PCs because some were too ancient to support the new hardware.

I flew to Houston almost thirty times over eight months, staying at the same Embassy Suites each trip. I was a familiar patron and was on a first-name basis with much of the hotel staff.

At any rate, with the assistance of a half-dozen network technicians, seven of Cisco Systems' flagship 7500-series routers and dozens-upon-dozens of Cabletron network switches were installed and interconnected via then-revolutionary FDDI rings.

That was the late 1990's, just a few years after 100-meg Ethernet was standardized.

Oh, I should mention now. In case you haven't figured it out yet, I'm a nerd. If geek-speak bothers you, you might want to move on because there's going to be more of it.

That brings us to Thursday, June 19, 1997, when my team was barely three days away from the campus shutdown scheduled for the following Sunday to move every single LAN-attached system over to the new network.

My exhausted brain and eyes were having a fit getting OSPF to converge. From my desk, I called my boss's boss at home and asked for a relief pitcher, thus precipitating a very long sequence of events.

"Larry, this is Will. I need help," I said when he answered his phone.

"In case you haven't seen the news, the whole Plano, Wylie, and Richardson areas just got hit by a hailstorm about three hours ago.

Baseball-sized

shit, so this had better be good news. My truck is probably totaled and my roof, which was redone after last year's storm, is trashed yet again."

"No, sir, I haven't turned on a TV in days."

I paused, working up my nerve. "I can't get Houston up and running. We are only two days away from the shutdown and upgrade. I've been at the site at least a hundred twenty hours in the last two weeks. I'm snow-blind."

He sighed. "We can't afford a slip in the schedule. What do you need?"

"A fresh set of eyes. I don't know what's wrong."

"I'm sure most of my teams are dealing with the aftermath of the hail, but I'll see what I can do. If anyone is available, I'll have someone at Hobby on the first Southwest flight tomorrow. Be there to pick him up unless I page you otherwise."

"Understood. For whom should I look?"

"I have no idea yet. I'll probably be up all night trying to arrange for someone."

He hung up.

I was at Houston's Hobby Airport the next morning waiting at the gate at which the earliest flight from Dallas arrived at 7:00am. This was before 9/11, when non-ticketed humans were allowed to meet incoming flights at their gates. I was scanning all of the roughly 120-plus passengers as they deplaned, waiting for a familiar face.

The passenger I recognized wasn't a "him," it was a "her."

An unimaginably beautiful Vietnamese woman, a petite five-foot two-inches tall, and maybe a hundred pounds packed into an incredibly lithe figure, walked out. She sported long raven-black hair which, that morning, was in a ponytail which draped about a foot below her shoulders. Her almond-shaped eyes gleamed even at that very early hour.

I know it's cliché to describe what she was wearing, but the fact I remember informs details which become important later. She was wearing white jeans and a light-colored tank over a black cotton camisole. It wasn't the lingerie sort, but the meant-to-be-seen type. The guy behind her appeared to be justifiably mesmerized by her long, swaying tassel of hair as she exited the jet-way. She saw me waiting across from the gate and rolled her eyes while turning in my direction. She fished her pager from her purse, turned it on, and clipped it to the strap.

"Ugh, Will! What the hell?" she barked.

I didn't mention earlier how she and I were at least conversationally friendly and familiar with each other. I should probably also mention, though being a Vietnamese immigrant since her late single digits, she sounded and acted as American as anyone I knew.

"Uh, hello?" I responded.

She was well-short of an arm's length away and said through partially clenched teeth, "I got a call from Jen at three o'clock this morning that Larry phoned her

requesting

," Dawn air-quoted, "her to send the best troubleshooter she has to this god-forsaken city to bail the water out of your fat-assed sinking boat of a project and get it back on track."

"And she sent you instead?" I joked.

I should have been but wasn't prepared for the fully balled-up fist or the force with which she propelled it into my left bicep.

"Ow!" I involuntarily yelped, drawing a few curious glances from passers-by. I tried to rub away the mild sting.

"Wimp."

"Did you check a bag?" I asked.

"What do you think?"

She raised her fist again, and I jumped back two steps.

I didn't know the answer, so I could only say, "Lead the way."

Unfortunately for the both of us, she had. I followed her to baggage claim where we waited for almost a half hour before we learned her bag had missed her flight and was on one scheduled to arrive thirty minutes later.

"I

hate

Houston," she muttered, just as an enormous clap of thunder reverberated through the terminal.

The notorious Houston weather had conjured up a notorious Houston thunderstorm which, though lasting only twenty minutes, delayed her bag's arrival an additional hour.

With her bag finally in hand, we headed to the parking garage.

If you've never been to Houston in the late spring or summer, I will tell you the heat and humidity are crazy-bad, even without a morning storm. As we walked through the exit, we were blasted with air containing plenty of both.

"I hate Houston!" she yelled, full volume, to no one in particular.

A guy heading into the terminal laughed at her outburst. She flipped him a bird, but he'd already walked past us and didn't see it. I laughed, though. We arrived at my car, and I put her bag into the back seat. I started the Taurus up and turned the air conditioner to full freeze to wring out all the humidity from the interior.

"So, no hail at your place?" I asked.

"There was a crap-ton, but I'm in an apartment so it's not my problem."

During the forty-five-minute drive to the campus, I filled her in on the details of the current status. She listened attentively.

"Your area zero is contiguous and the stubs are set up? Authentication keys double checked? Adjacencies are stable? Debugs all look quiet?" preceded a dozen other questions to which I answered, "Yes," "I think so," or "Not sure."

"Perhaps you've invented another dipshit mistake."

Dawn's demeanor had been described by the "man-crowd" as everything from "abrasive" to, in less polite communities, "butch," or even "bitch." I never perceived her that way, instead deciding it was an offense/defense mechanism employed by a gifted and talented woman in a very male-dominated career. From the first time I met her, I thought it was, maybe,

cute

.

"Well, if anyone is good at sniffing out shit, it's you."

Her fist arose again, but she only shook it at me, rolled her eyes, sighed, and smiled. Her smile, by the way, was perfection defined. It exhibited glistening white teeth behind perfectly tinted lips.

"Let's just get this over with. I hate this place with its stinking humidity and the stench of oil refineries."

We arrived at the campus just before lunchtime. I gave her the pre-production password I had set on the systems, and she went to work.

One hour elapsed. Then two. Then three hours. Her focus was unmistakably intense, whereas I was only pacing the raised floor, trying to pass time like an expectant father.

"I'm hungry," she said.

"Cafeteria's closed. You want to go out?"

"Please grab me a candy bar, a bag of chips, and a Diet Coke."

"What kind of cand⁠—"

"Just pick anything," she said, holding out a five-dollar bill.

I left the computer room for the break area. I fed the bill into the change machine which rewarded me with nineteen quarters. Yes, our change machines levied a "convenience fee."

I fed a buck-fifty total into two vending machines and selected a Payday, a bag of Lay's potato chips, and a can of Diet Coke.

Returning to the computer room, I placed my selections in front of her. She opened all three after depositing the change in her purse. I presumed the lack of complaints meant she was satisfied with my choices.

She removed from the package and lightly nibbled on one single solitary potato chip, followed by one small bite of the candy bar, and one sip of the soda. She repeated the cadence and pattern several times while she focused.

She lifted another chip toward her mouth, but paused before it reached its destination, staring at the same screen for what had to be two minutes, completely motionless and silent. She popped the entire chip into her mouth, crunched it, and drew a deep swig of the Coke as she erected her posture.

"Assemble your team. It appears we have a traitor among us," she said, barely audibly over the hum of the computer room's air handlers.

I spent nearly five minutes paging all six of the technicians whom I told to come immediately to the computer room when they phoned in. As they arrived, they loosely gathered around.

Dawn pulled a chair from an adjacent cube and rolled it into the center of an unoccupied area of the raised floor. She sat backwards in it and pointed at the CRT a few yards away. Everyone I summoned scanned the screen.

"Who did that?" she asked above the noise of the air handlers.

Each of the six looked at the monitor for a few seconds then shifted their eyes towards Dawn. The last of the six, the only other woman in the room, examined the monochrome amber screen for a few moments.

Bethany chuckled. "I'm not even allowed to log into these things, but I see it."

Hiding my defensiveness, I approached her. "Where?" I asked.

Beth pointed precisely with her finger, and I breathed a sigh of relief when I realized it wasn't my mistake. The gremlin had been discovered. Though I should have caught it and had obviously seen the error myself a dozen times, my exhausted brain failed to recognize it.

Returning my attention to the group, I realized not one of the five men was paying attention. Every single one of them was staring at Dawn. When I followed their gazes to her parted legs, I turned away in my vain attempt to preserve her modesty. It was a sight I never forgot. Her opened thighs exhibited the white denim tightly formed against the very lowest extent of her torso.

"Hey! There's a question on the floor. It took me four hours to find it. Beth caught it. Even Will and his sleep-deprived brain sees it. I know only two of you could've done this, and I want to know who was responsible for this part of the configuration, as well as who was responsible for 'validating' it," she said with air-quotes.

Two sets of eyes broke their transfixed gazes and dropped to the floor. Of course, Dawn would have already known the answer to her question after examining the logs.

"Bethany, you've got good eyes. Will should've had you do the reviews," Dawn said with a brief wrap of her knuckles on the desk.

Beth nervously grinned, and quickly backed out of the area toward her own workstation.

"Both of you, follow me," Dawn said, pointing to the two senior technicians.

They obliviously obeyed. I followed all of them as Dawn improvised a lecture all the way to the building's exit where she snatched the badges off their shirts and ducked back into the secured part of the building. On returning to the computer room, she picked up a phone and made a call.

"Larry, it's Dawn," she said, adopting an affectatiously calm voice. "I took Leo Robinson's and Brad Franklin's badges after I walked them out of Building Four. I'll give the badges to whatever security guard is on duty tonight before Will and I leave the campus.

"They were responsible for this mess which will be fixed shortly. The cutover should proceed as planned. Of course, it's the decision of you and the other lords of the land if you want to tell them to pick up their badges next week or whatever, but Will can't afford them. Goodbye!"

She hung the phone up gingerly, matching her affected farewell, accompanied by a mock girl-child smile and curtsy Larry could not, of course, have seen.

Dawn paused in thought. "Will, I'm almost sure those two dipshits deliberately tried to screw you over just as bad as they effed up my project earlier this year," she said evenly. "I don't understand why they're still employed here."

Dawn needed just a few minutes to correct the issue. "Now that the network is up and running, I see switch 31B2A isn't online. Can you go confirm its uplink parameters match these?" She pointed at the screen.

Building Three was across from the parking lot, and IDF room 1B was near the main entry.

I connected the portable terminal to the topmost switch in rack two and verified the settings were correct. I examined the switch and found the fiberoptic connectors weren't fully seated in their sockets. I clicked them both into place and watched the status LEDs turn yellow, then green. I called Dawn from the room.

"It just came up. What'd you do?" she asked.

"The clips on both connectors weren't latched."

"Okay. Looks good now. Come on back."

It took just a few minutes for me to return to the computer room.

"Let me ask you something. I think Beth is freaking sharp. You and I should recommend she be transferred to our team. What do you think?" Dawn asked as soon as I returned.

"I stared at those same lines for two days and didn't see it. She saw it in ten seconds. I guess I pigeonholed her thinking hardware was her strong suit, not the configurations, but if she's been self-studying to the point she saw it … I agree. Might be good timing, too, considering there are slots open since Dave hooked up with Karen and left to work in

facilities

of all places."

"Hooked up? No. Try

knocked

up."

I gasped in surprise. "What?"

"Dude, pay attention. Karen is preggers. You might have heard David transferred to facilities, but no. They both got sacked two weeks ago for non-disclosure of their relationship. Rumor has it that Jen caught them making out in a dark conference room when they were working late."

I digested that little bit of news and decided it was none of my business other than how three weeks in Houston had made me oblivious to what was happening back at home base. At any rate, a couple of months later, Bethany was promoted to our equal. She had a successful ten-year run before choosing to go to even greener pastures at another company.

So, the day was saved by Dawn "sniffing shit" and finding a very obscure, perhaps

deliberate

transposition in an interface configuration parameter I was just too tired to see. After it was corrected, every pre-implementation test completed perfectly by seven o'clock that evening.

"My work here is done. You've got another full day to get ready before the down. I'm going to catch a cab to the airport," Dawn said, knowing standby seats on flights back to Dallas would be readily available since they departed every half hour until ten o'clock.

"Thank you, thank you,

thank you

!" I sang.

I knelt to one knee in a gratuitously dramatic fashion, clasped my hands together in front of me, and bowed toward her to show my gratitude. Her rescue was just one of several interventions which added to my respect for Dawn's abilities. I kissed a knuckle of her offered hand.

She grinned, chuckling at my display. "Get up, you doofus."

"Madam, would you care to have a drink or thirty with me? If we hurry, the free happy hour at the Embassy is still open. You can catch the first flight out tomorrow morning if you must."

"What the hell. I didn't expect we'd get this squared away today, so I guess I can."

We collected our things and walked out of the computer room. Dawn stopped at the security desk and gave the guard the technicians' badges before explaining why she had taken them from them. She gave them Larry's contact information in case they needed clarification.

We piled back into my rental and departed for the Embassy Suites which was just a few miles from the campus.

I waited with Dawn as she booked herself a suite. It was a Friday night, and, considering that particular property primarily served business travelers, the hotel was lightly occupied. She managed to score a free upgrade to one of the few executive suites. She asked the bellman to deliver her bags to her room, and we proceeded to the bar.