The Three Keys

My normally chaotic inbox was as silent as the rest of the office. The Woman Next Door's (WND) keyboard did not clack, there was no mindless chatter in the break room nearby. The silence didn't sit well with me, not after the whole incident with the Head of HR (HoHR) regarding the monitoring app she wanted to install on all company iPhones. Motorcycle IT Guy (MITG) had yet to respond to my latest heads-up from my personal email account.

I allowed my mind to wander for a moment, back towards home and my family, only to have any sliver of peace shattered by a shrill cry from the office next to me.

"Is the Server down, rstrt!?" The WND cried out. I opened my command prompt and ran a quick nmap against our server range. One by one the systems responded, until we came to the IP belonging to Exchange. I fled away to the server room, keys in one hand and my laptop in the other. I prayed that the secondary Exchange server would automatically fail-over, but I didn't expect anything. I stopped dead in my tracks, mouth agape in horror, the door to the server room was open.

There were three keys pressed when they moved into this office space, before my time. One key went to MITG, one to his assistant and eventually on to me, and the final key went to the Head of HR who threw a fit until she got keys to every door in the office. MITG was on holiday, and I haven't gone into the room for a few days now. I slipped inside to see none other than the HoHR standing over the primary rack.

"What are you doing in here?" I asked, feeling a little too confident.

"You won't install it for me, so I'm going to do it myself."

"So why did you turn off the Exchange server then!?" I paused to catch myself, my blood was starting to boil. "Even if you were using the right server, you still don't have credentials to install software. Tell me what you did, and get the hell out of the server room."

"I, uh, I had a hard time with the mouse and keyboard. I couldn't get them to move on the screen so I held down the power button to restart it." She pointed towards the KVM.* She also caught herself, since she wasn't used to me being so stern with her. "And just who the hell do you think you're talking to? If you had just done your job then I wouldn't have been in here in the first place. You know I could fire you right now-"

"Go right ahead. MITG gets back tomorrow, and I'm sure that CEO would love to hear how he was without mail for 24 hours. Now get out, I have work to do." She turned on her heels and huffed out of the room, swearing at me under her breath, slamming the server room door behind her. I decided it was more important to get the Exchange server up than to send MITG another email, so I went about triaging the system.

Some unknown amount of time later, the server was up and running. I went to the espresso machine to get an afternoon pick me up when my phone rang, it was the CEO.

"Hello, CEO, how are you?"

"Tomorrow morning, 0800, my office. We need to have a talk."

"Yes sir, see you in the morning." The CEO hung up. This was unusual behavior for him, as he was normally quite a pleasant guy to talk to. HoHR must have been busy while I was repairing her damage.

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