'Jack boy, you have so nailed this,' John Michael Robertson, Jack to his friends, thought to himself as he finished reading the report on his computer screen for the third time.
A recent graduate of Northern California State, the twenty-one year old was one of six interns vying for a permanent position at Cornwall, Dunmore and Frost, and while his performance the last few months had made him the front runner, one other candidate, Rebecca Blackwood, had turned in equally impressive work. It was all going to come down to their reports on the Red Star Electronics merger, scheduled to be presented to their department head come Monday morning.
'There is no way that Rebecca's report is going to be better than this,' Jack further thought as he leaned back in his chair, reaching down to pick up the beer he'd bought when he'd run out to grab dinner. With a great sense of satisfaction, he popped off the top and took a drink from the cold bottle.
Drinking in the office was generally frowned upon, especially if you were as far down in the pecking order as an intern was, and normally Jack wouldn't have dreamed of doing so. But it was after eight on a Friday night, with even the cleaning crews having come and gone, and there really wasn't anyone around to object. This was the fifth night this week that Jack had worked late, not that he was getting paid for the extra hours, so he felt justified in bending the rules to have a little celebration.
'I can't wait to see Rebecca's face when I win the competition,' Jack thought as he savored the pleasing brew.
The two interns had taken a dislike to each other almost from day one, possibly because each recognized the other as their only real competition. The best the other four participants in the program could hope for was third place, and all that got you was a few lines on your resume when you applied for your next position. In fact, the same also held true for second place.
With the stakes that high, there was little Jack wouldn't do to make sure that, when all was said and done, his name was on the top of the list. It was beyond his thinking that Rebecca might not feel the same way. It wasn't enough to make sure that you won, you also had to make sure everyone else lost - even if you had to help them do so by sabotaging their work. It was a belief that had been reinforced by the events of the last few months.
The way the internship worked, in addition to the regular duties that were designed to give you real world business experience, each intern was given an assignment to write an evaluation of a proposed business deal and was then judged on how closely their report mirrored that of the professionals. To make it more of a competition, two or more of them were given the same assignment.
That had been the case during the first month, when both Jack and Rebecca were given the Northstar Electronics deal, and key elements of Jack's argument against the proposed acquisition had also turned up in Rebecca's report - the result being that his presentation appeared far less original than he'd expected it to be. It was possible, he had to admit, that the long haired blonde might have come to the same conclusions on her own - after all, it really wasn't that complex a deal and they'd both had access to the same information.
But then a month later, on their second assignment, it happened again, and Jack wasn't that much of a believer in coincidences. That she might be as good at the job as he was, or possibly even better, wasn't something he was willing to even consider. Somehow, Jack concluded, Rebecca had to be getting a look at his work beforehand and adjusting hers accordingly.
How she was doing it was a mystery, but it was clear to anyone who cared to notice how men in the office went out of their way to be helpful to the curvaceous twenty-two year old. To say nothing of the fact that not a week had gone by without one of them asking Rebecca either out to lunch or for drinks after work. One, or even a few of them, could very well be helping her undermine him.
That an equal number of women in the office had done the same for him never entered his thinking. In his case it would more likely be drinks after work than lunch, and some of the favors done for him would definitely not be found in their job descriptions.
'Well, however she did it before, she's not going to be able to do it this time,' Jack assured himself as he took another long drink from the bottle.
A musical ringtone from his cell phone interrupted that thought and, in order to free his hand to get the phone out of his pocket, Jack put the beer bottle down next to his computer monitor.
"Yo dude, what's up?" he said after glancing at the caller id.
Intently, he listened to the story his friend felt was so important that it had to be shared immediately. The story was indeed funny, so much that Jack laughed so hard that he hit the edge of his cubicle table, the impact hard enough to topple the beer bottle, spilling the contents across the countertop and through the cable openings to the tower below.
Even as he began to react, reaching outward in a futile attempt to catch the bottle, the air filled with a loud popping sound and the image on his monitor flashed brightly before going totally blank.
"Fuck!" Jack cried out in alarm.
He stared at the dead screen for a few seconds until the sound of his friend's voice from the phone he had dropped reminded him that he was still on the line.
"Man, I gotta call you back," Jack quickly said once he picked up the phone and ended the call.
Taking a deep breath, Jack tried to reboot the computer, but none of the power lights came on. He tried it two more times before admitting to himself that the machine was truly dead.
"Okay, now is not the time to panic," he said out loud to himself. "Machines get toasted all the time," he added, recalling several that had unexpectedly died during his time at the firm. The important thing was, his report was safe and sound on his personal flash drive.
Slipping the small keychain drive from the usb port, he slid his chair over to the computer of the intern that shared his cubicle and powered it up. Thankfully, he didn't need a password to boot up any of the computers, just to log onto the server. He waited anxiously while the computer came to life. Once it did, he slid his flash drive into a usb port and waited for it to appear in the directory.
Long seconds passed but nothing happened.
"Oh fuck, no," Jack said, his words mixed with a groan.
Desperately, he tried the drive in the computer's other two usb ports, with equal results. There was no denying that the flash drive was also dead.
"Fuck, I am so fucked," he again said out loud.
Not trusting the other interns any more than he trusted Rebecca, Jack had not backed up his work to anything but his personal drive, which never left his person. Now indeed was the time to panic, as there was no way he could ever reconstruct his report from scratch before Monday. Especially since most of the people he would need to obtain information from were gone for the weekend.
'There's got to be something I can do,' he thought, holding the flash drive and his quickly vanishing future in his hand. 'Hard drives go bad,' he recalled, 'but they can sometimes still get files off them.'
The only problem with that comforting thought was that he didn't know the first thing about how to even go about trying. The only thing he knew about computers was how to use software related to his work; fixing the damn things was someone else's job.
Again he glanced at the clock on the wall, noting the time and the slim possibility that any of the IT geeks would still be downstairs. Still, it was worth a try.
The phone rang enough times for him to lose even that slim hope, but then, just as he was about to give up, a voice came on the line.
"Tech support, Martinez," a female voice said.
Jack quickly explained what had happened, well maybe not exactly what happened. In the version he gave to the woman on the phone, he had no idea why his workstation had suddenly exploded.
"Well, just put a ticket in and someone will take a look at it Monday morning," the woman said, adding that everyone else was already gone and she was also about to leave.
"Couldn't you just take quick look at it?" Jack asked. "It might be something really minor, just a quick fix."
"It doesn't sound like it," the woman said, "but I guess I can spare a few minutes to take a look."
