Page 37 of Debugging Love

Hiding, I see,Morgan says.

Yup,I answer.I can’t see his eyes now. It’s fine.

Don’t you have to help him set up his dev environment?

I don’t have to look at him while I’m doing it.

A half-second passes and then Morgan adds,Kayla won’t be in today.

Did she manifest a snow day?

Clearly not,Morgan answers,otherwise none of us would be here.

If it snowed a foot, they’d still make us come in.

They’d make us come in if it was five thousand Kelvins.

Yup,I type.

Hey, rumor has it we're gonna get to telework soon.

Ever since I started at JetAero, the word “telework” has been thrown around, mostly by my coworkers in wistful tones. Notsure how I feel about it. Walking ten feet to work in my jammies and unicorn slippers might be nice, but I like seeing my friends. I’d miss our mid-morning coffee breaks and our laughs over lunch.

Interesting,I reply.

Bruce heard they’re thinking three days a week.

How would Bruce know?

Bruce knows everything.

Bruce knows line 205 in the block of code he wrote three years ago. The man’s memory retention is second only to Adrian Monk’s. And maybe Drew’s. But I’d never say that out loud because Drew doesn’t need another reason to think he’s the next best thing since Stephen Hawking.

Morgan and I spend a few more minutes chatting and then we plow into work. I open up my app and continue where I left off Friday, debugging an error that Juanita found during integration testing. As usual, I lose myself in logic and five minutes later, it’s ten o’clock. It feels like five minutes, anyway. Morgan taps the back of my chair, reminding me it’s coffee time. We leave Chance at his desk staring at his phone. Aside from his incessant gum popping and his giant feet encroaching on my legroom and his cologne hovering around him like an ever-present aura, I haven’t noticed him a bit.

When I return, Chance is still looking at his phone. I poke around in my code for a few minutes until I’m ready to go shoulder to shoulder with him. I peek around the desk divider and find him hunched over, palm under chin, elbow to knee, still engrossed in his phone. “Are you ready?”

“For what?” he asks without looking at me.

“Are you ready for me to help you set up your development environment?”

He swipes his thumb across his screen and glances at me. “Sure. Let’s do it.”

I push myself from my desk and inch my way over to Chance with my heels. He smells like mint and cologne. Orbit Sweet Mint, specifically, and a fresh cologne with alpine hints. Good thing I’m not allergic to fresh colognes with alpine hints. The pile of gum wrappers on his desk, each one filled with a chewed wad of minty food-grade rubber, I could do without. But if I hurry through this, I won’t have to look at it too long.

“We use BrainyJ. It’s available in the APSC,” I say, pronouncing it app-see.

He looks up from his phone long enough to raise an eyebrow at me.

“The Approved Software Center,” I explain.

“App-see. App-see,” Chance repeats.

“A-P-S-C.”

He swipes up with his thumb, closing the Star Trek game he was playing, and opens Wordle.

“Okay, then. Do you know how to get to the APSC?”

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