The phone was ringing. Stephan rolled over and picked it up. He had been dead asleep when it rang. He knew it was work and that something had broken. Or more to the point somebody broke something.
"Sorry to wake you" came the voice over the phone. It was Marie. One of the overnight technical staff. She was hot, Stephan thought. Long dark hair and olive skin. He smiled thinking about her and felt his cock start to stir at the sound of her voice. It was always nice when he came on shift in the morning and she was still working.
"Ben wanted me to call you. The overnight transactions to Singapore didn't run."
Stephan said, "Okay, why didn't Ben call?"
"He didn't want to be the one to wake you up."
"The little chickenshit. Well, I guess I would much rather be woken up by you. Did you resubmit the job?"
"No, Ben said to call you first."
Stephan wished for a moment he could kill people with his mind but then decided it was best that he couldn't. "Follow the directions to resubmit and I'll log in."
Stephan went over to his desk where laptop was charging. He logged into the VPN to monitor things and then fired up a few other windows to kill some time. Finally he fired up Slack and messaged Marie.
S> It looks like it's started running.
M> Sorry about that.
S> Not your fault. Besides it's nice to hear a friendly voice.
Stephan was surfing humor sites when he stumbled on a Dilbert cartoon with the punchline, "Customer service, how may I thwart you?" He laughed and sent the link to Marie.
She responded with a Dilbert comic featuring Mordac, Preventer of Information Services. Then came a lolcat. Stephan smiled and sent back a link to a particularly hillbilly kludge. They traded pictures back and forth a bit until the job finished running.
S>It looks like it worked.
M>Sorry for waking you up like that.
S>Could be worse. I didn't have to put on pants.
M> O_o no pants?
S>No nothing. I'll see you in a couple of hours.
Stephan logged out and went back to sleep, his dreams were haunted by Marie.
That morning Stephan came into work and walked by the help desk. He peered over the dividing wall. He was almost 2 meters tall and heavy. He had long dark hair pulled back in a tight pony tail and blue eyes set under heavy brows. He had rugged good looks and appeared to be every inch a barbarian. He was wearing a black T-shirt emblazoned with "I'm here because you broke something." Marie was sitting at one desk watching a video on her personal laptop and Ben was sitting at the desk next to Marie.
Stephan walked around the corner and looked at Ben. Ben was tragically normal. Slightly overweight, plaid shirt, khaki pants. Shortish brown hair, dull brown eyes.
Stephan stared at Ben, "So..."
Ben stood up. "I have to check the server room." He said dashing off.
"I'm sorry we woke you up." Marie said.
Stephan looked down at her and smiled. "It's okay. She was wearing a light jacked over loose t-shirt. She also had a mother of pearl pendant hanging between her breasts. Stephan wondered what her breasts would look like out of her shirt. They seemed firm. They weren't overly large but he imagined it would be nice to suck on them. He looked into her eyes and she smiled.
"What are you watching?" he asked.
"Some Rifftrax movie. It's pretty funny."
"What's Rifftrax?"