Page 88 of Ten Years and Then…
He hadn’t felt it at the time, so he skipped the extra water and aspirin when he got back to his room. Now, of course, he was paying for it.
The bathroom light was far brighter than it had any right to be, and his mouth was all cottony and dry. He wasn’t properly hungover, just generally crummy. Enough to be moving and thinking a little too slowly. No doubt enough for his team to notice.
This didn’t have to be a disaster, though. He could drink water now, and take the aspirin. That would keep him from feeling any worse. Then plenty of coffee, and maybe once he got over to the show floor, adrenaline would kick in. Then more caffeine around nine o’clock, and plenty more water.
That was a solid plan. By lunchtime he’d be his normal self. Their big demo today wasn’t until two o’clock anyway. Once that was over, there’d only be another two hours at the booth, then he could retreat back to the hotel for an early dinner, a couple of hours of mindless TV watching, and to bed by nine o’clock.
Yes, that sounded like a typical evening for his grandfather—dinner at five, Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy, an hour of whatever cop show happened to be on, then straight to bed. But it was just one night. Tomorrow was the most important day of the conference—three demos, two meetings with vendors and a panel session he’d be on stage for. He had to be at his best for all that, and if the price was his team mocking him for acting like an eighty year old, so be it.
Nora, an hour later
Nora woke up completely refreshed. She felt better than she had in—well, longer than she could remember.
It would have been nice to think that it was good karma from her conversation with Annette last night. But that wasn’t true; she’d gone to bed thinking about Daniel.
Uneasy thoughts about Daniel—missing him, wondering if it really was him Annette saw yesterday, and what she’d do if she saw him herself.
It had taken her a good hour to actually fall asleep once she’d gotten into bed, with all those thoughts whirling around in her head. A year ago, those thoughts would have kept her up all night. That was progress, wasn’t it?
The bed itself must have been the reason she felt so good this morning. A really good mattress obviously made all the difference. Maybe if she got a bonus at the end of the year, she could upgrade from the clearance-sale bed she’d bought when she moved into her apartment last year to something halfway decent.
She could start earning that year-end bonus this morning. She’d managed to snag an interview with a senior engineer from Intel, thirty minutes with him at nine-thirty, right before the show floor opened.
A quick shower, a decent breakfast and she’d be all ready. She’d show Mr. Brooks—and Jack Elliott, and everyone else—that she didn’t just belong at Livingston. She was going to be a star there.
Daniel, two hours later
The water and aspirin and caffeine were definitely helping. Daniel felt like he was operating at a good 70% of his normal capacity, which should be enough to get through the morning.
The team was doing their part to help. Everyone was at the booth on time, all wearing their QNS logo polo shirts—the men in dark gray, and the Kristins in their assigned red and blue. It only occurred to him now that by giving them different colored shirts, he was calling extra attention to them. He hadn’t meant to single them out, but he’d unwittingly done exactly that.
No. They were still loose-fitting polo shirts. Nobody could mistake them for anything other than well-qualified experts on the company’s products. Besides, anybody who did would get a—very polite—earful from either Kristin.
“I think we’re doing great,” Daniel told the team. “Let’s just check all the computers again, make sure everything is ready to go, and everyone give their station one more cleaning—the Lysol is on the shelf behind the back podium.”
Everything was ready to go, and when the crowd started pouring in at ten o’clock, his adrenaline definitely kicked in. He talked to a hundred people—well, probably not, but it felt like that many—just in the first hour. And he had a great fifteen minute conversation with the Technology Infrastructure Manager for Los Angeles County. If QNS could get a contract there, it would be a massive win—not just for the company, obviously, but for his team. And, maybe for him personally.
He was so excited after that conversation, he didn’t even get annoyed when a photographer for the Livingston Scientific Network asked him to pose in front of the booth, as ridiculous as it made him feel.
Kristin Chambers—Red Kristin—came back from a bathroom break just in time to see the photographer walk away. When Daniel told her what had happened, she said, “They publish Modern Computing, didn’t you know that?” He didn’t.
Then she ran after the photographer, and dragged him back to the booth. “If he’s going to be in the magazine, we should all be. Everybody get up front!”
So Daniel posed for another photo. If it made the team happy, he could live with it.
Nora, two hours later
The interview with Dr. Patel from Intel had been great. Nora could see it being the centerpiece of her coverage for the whole conference. If she’d understood him correctly—and she was pretty sure she had—their new Pentium chips would be a real game-changer for the whole industry. And the powerful new software those chips could run would change a hundred more industries in ways nobody was even thinking about yet.
Telling that story was exactly why Mr. Brooks had sent her to this conference. She’d show him his confidence in her wasn’t misplaced.
Nora didn’t have any other interviews scheduled this morning, so she decided to explore the show floor. She had a list of companies to check out, and after the Intel interview, she had better questions to ask them.
Right there in row 500 was one of those companies. Quantum Network Systems. They had a double-sized booth, and several computers set up running slideshows showing the benefits of their fiber optic networks. They didn’t seem to have anyone skinny, dark-haired and cute working their booth, though.
She stepped into the booth, and examined the display model of an actual fiber optic cable. Nora hadn’t actually seen one before.
“Here, let me show you,” a very short, brown haired man said. He flipped a switch on a little box attached to the cable, and light began to pulse along it. “Of course, normally it’s insulated, but this way you can see how it works.”
