I had a girlfriend who liked to be spanked. I don't remember how it got started but I wanted to write a story where spanking was introduced.
Episode 70: Taking the Blame for Kacey's Mistake (part 1)
We see an attractive, young woman in an office type at a keyboard. There's only one desk in the room but there's room for a table and some chairs on the other side of the desk between the desk and the door. She's 21 or 22, new out of college. She's wearing a very high-waisted, tight skirt that is mid-thigh. Her top is a pullover with an elastic bottom that meets the top of the skirt.
Another attractive woman, around 30, enters. This one is dressed conservatively — a business skirt that comes down just above the knees and a plain blouse. She looks very frantic. "Kacey, what's going on? I've had a dozen calls in the last five minutes about our trading app being down."
Kacey is beaming, she's so happy with herself. "Oh, I already took care of that! A job I was monitoring was stalled, so I restarted the server, and that solved the problem."
Tiffany has kind of a sick look to her. "You brought down the production server?"
"It wasn't even down five minutes. No problem."
Tiffany leans against a chair and then sits down. She looks seriously at Kacey and speaks quietly and deliberately. "Kacey, when you brought down the server, you didn't just reset that one job. You reset every app that runs on it." Now Kacey's looking worried. "That includes our international trading app." She pauses to think "We've got 2000 registered users, and this is the peak time of the day, so there might've been 500 traders using it. An average trade makes $1000, so you may have just cost us ... $500,000."
They both sit there stunned. Kacey asks meekly "what happens next? Am I in a lot of trouble?"
"Shit, yes, you're in a lot of trouble!"
"Am I going to lose my job."
Tiffany's thinking. "I don't know yet. You're a good programmer and a hard worker. I'd hate to lose you. It's really just bad luck that your first mistake affected our most important app. I don't feel that you should lose your job on your first mistake, but I know the partners will be pissed when they find out what happened."
They sit in silence for a moment. "What can I do?"
"I'm thinking. If I had made the error, I have enough rep with the company that I could probably get through this. I don't know. Let me make a call." She calls on her phone. "Emily, this is Tiffany. "I'm working with Kacey on the server problem. We had some processes that were bogging down the server, and we had to reboot it. I had a message drafted to the users that we were bringing it down for ten minutes, but I didn't notice that the message had an address error and wasn't delivered before we rebooted." She pauses. "Yes, I know." Another pause. "Yes, I'll make sure it's written up, and we'll have a report submitted by the end of the week. Yes, me too. We're very sorry for this error."
She hangs up and looks at Kacey. "You heard our promise. I want you to send me a note about the job you were running and get the logs and include something about the other jobs that were using the most resources at the time. We'll report that they were all delayed and that we had to reboot."
"Do I get to keep my job?"
"Yeah, I think so. I mostly took the blame for it, but everyone considers me the IT Goddess, so I can get by one time. My reputation will get bruised, but they won't replace me."
"Tiffany, I'm so grateful for this!"
"Save your gratitude. I've got to figure out some way to punish you. You can't cause this much damage without any punishment, but it's going to have to be private between us because no one knows you're to blame. I'd have you make donations to a nonprofit except I know that you're already over your head in debt from the school loan. What I'm leaning to is having you spend 50 Saturdays doing volunteer work." She pauses. "Let's both think about it. Let's get together after work, and we'll brainstorm."
"I live lots closer to work than you do, so why don't you come over to my place and I'll heat up some dinner for us, too."
"I'll be there." Tiffany leaves the room.