Infinite Exposure by Roland Hughes Page B

simply translated and printed. He had been printing enough that his printer was starting
     to have issues.
    That's it!
    He still had the support contract with the company where John worked. Both of his “roommates” had even complained about his
     printer acting up recently. John was in charge of his account. He could log a ticket with them and see who responded. If the
     response didn't come from John, he would at least know he had gotten away.
    Nedim returned home after work and began his ritual of processing email. When it came time to print, his printer started acting
     up right on cue. Both roommates complained. Nedim opened up the file containing his support contract information and went
     to the Web site. After keying in his customer ID and password he was allowed to enter a new trouble ticket. He ran the applet
     which gathered all of the information about his system configuration and driver versions and attached the file to the trouble
     ticket. He informed his roommates that if the problem was in the driver or other software he had, he would have a fix before
     tomorrow.
    Ramesh made a note to have the team purchase another printer. Once a cheap ink jet printer started having problems, they tended
     to go straight to Hell. This printer was a Brother printer; the absolute bottom of the industry. Ramesh was surprised it had
     lasted the past three weeks, let alone however long Nedim had been using it. One thing was certain in Ramesh's mind: Products with the Brother name plate were condoms - Use once and dispose of properly .
    ***
    Kent sat in a very fine restaurant in Paris. The IT workers in this location were giving him the royal treatment trying to
     hang onto their jobs. Given that some of the board members liked to vacation in France, Kent had put this data center as the
     last one on the list before the central two. The bank was still going to have to keep some kind of offices here so board members
     could take “business trips” to France. These trips always coincided with the start of their vacations, but thankfully neither
     the shareholders nor the IRS had called them on it.
    Prior to lunch, Kent had asked each of the department heads to come up with a migration plan for this division of the bank
     to use the existing bank system rather than the one their bank currently used. The deadline for them to get it to him was
     Friday. They had complained that all of the work currently being done in the existing system wouldn't allow them time to prepare
     such a migration plan. Kent told them to stop all work on the system and to begin mapping the data for load into First Global
     Bank's existing system.
    What Kent didn't know was they had already done this work a year ago at Margret's request. They had a list of business rules
     that must be added to First Global Bank's system before it could be used, but the bulk of the data mapping was already in
     place. They would have to spend less than a day on updating it. In effect, Kent had given them the rest of the week off when
     he put in writing no further work was to occur on the system they supported. Most spent the rest of the day updating their
     resumes and talking with family on the phone. Nobody there was stupid enough to believe they still had a job.
    Kent's real reason for going on this trip was to get everyone putting together a plan to migrate their systems into the primary
     system used by the original bank. He was visiting the data centers in reverse migration order so if the migration project
     came in late, he would be able to pitch the “world view” project to the board as the natural completion. Kent hadn't bothered
     to read any of the documentation Margret had emailed him prior to contracting with Big Four Consulting to do the data center
     migrations. If he had, the data center migration project wouldn't be happening at all.
    Now he sat in a very fine restaurant drinking very fine wine and eating very fine food. Only the heads of this bank