The Fifth Floor
I sat in a meeting room adjacent from the Head of HR, she was giving me her usual scowl. The PFY was sitting in a chair next to me playing on his phone when the Detective was escorted in by Operator-0 (Zero, our front desk attendant.). He shook hands and I showed him the tape.
"You said you knew the figure on the tape? Who was he?" The Detective asked me.
"His name is Greasy. He works on the fifth floor with an admin named Geoff." The detective asked me a myriad of questions, which if I'm honest I don't remember all of. He took the flash drive containing the tape and thanked me for my time. As he left I caught a glimpse of HoHR's face, she was staring at me. I could feel the hatred emanating from her, similar to what I imagine it feels like standing next to the sun.
"It's strange how this, Greasy character, managed to know exactly where our server room is…"
"Not really, we share an HVAC system with several floors server rooms. Granted, we have our own AC unit as backup but-"
"Don't bother, rstrt. You're going to slip up sooner or later, and I'm going to be there to make sure that when you do you spend a long time in a cell."
'It surely beats working with you.' I kept my mouth shut, there was no use in provoking her any further. The PFY was close on my heels on the way back to the dregs. The ticket queue had been ignored for long enough, so we set to work on pretending to actually support users. The PFY had taken on almost all of the generic help desk stuff, leaving me with the significantly more interesting projects.
"rstrt, Dan's got a problem and he says it requires escalation."
"Dan is a problem that requires escalation. What is it?"
"No idea, he refuses to talk to me at all."
"That's a good sign, patch him through." I waited for the ring and picked up my receiver. "Dan, what's going on?"
"It's broken!"
"Have you tried turning it on and off again?" I jokingly said, but I heard a chime in the background and waited for a response.
"That worked." And the familiar slam of Dan's receiver.
"What was it?" The PFY was leaning on my doorframe.
"I'm honestly not sure."
The following few days were business as usual, save for me getting quotes on new cold-spare units and dealing with little issues popping up from our emergency swap. The Woman Next Door (WND) still clacked away, and the sounds of the PFY fielding password resets and keyboard replacements. I dug around a bit more into the Black File during this time, mostly to find out if Motorcycle IT Guy (MITG) had any info on what the Fifth Floor does. I did run across a line for Geoff, apparently he had quite the penchant for gambling but didn't seem to be very good at it.
The following week my phone rang, it was Money. "Money, I know the servers are way off budget."
"Yeah, not calling about that. Grab Skip and go to the lobby." Skip and I ran down the stairs as fast as possible, hoping whatever interesting event would still be happening. I flew through the door to the lobby. I fell upon the sight of Geoff and Greasy in handcuffs, the Detective walking them out of the building. HoHR was present in the lobby, and her stare said it all.
'I'll have your job, rstrt.'
Part 9 Epilogue
I did not find out until quite some time later exactly what had happened. The Black File was right about Geoff, he had owed quite a lot of money and the bank was going to foreclose on his house. He apparently got the bright idea to siphon off some of the insurance money from the damages. He decided it would be best if it happened on several floors, ours included. Since we shared a central HVAC system with the other server rooms (and had our own secondary which they shut off.) they knew exactly where the room was. They were pulling drives and apparently wiping an electromagnet over them, a more thorough data recovery than I had available would have pulled the corrupted data back. Geoff was eventually sentenced to several years in jail, and the fifth floor tenant moved out. To this day, however, I still have no idea what exactly they did.