The Love Hack - Chapter 2 by mariacomet
Part 2 – The one where Emma celebrates her birthday
"Your company's customer service is horrible." The man railed into the phone. Emma turned down its volume on her headset and sketched a computer monitor with gnashed teeth and big, bulging, unhappy eyes while she listened to the customer bemoan the performance of his computer. He couldn't get to his email and there were pictures of his grandchildren at stake.
She could sympathize with the dilemma of an innocent grandfather battling the tyranny of computer overlords. Her heartstrings were easily tuggable and, of course, she fell into crusader mode. Some people had panic attacks, she had 'knight in shining armor' attacks. It led her down perilous trails, one of which she was only now beginning to get her life back from.
"Mr Abigail, your computer continuously freezing on you probably means…"
Mr Abigail angrily objected to the idea that his computer would freeze, as he always kept the house a perfect 73 degrees. Emma, flabbergasted, felt the urge to bang her head on her cubicle desk several times in rapid and hard succession.
Okay, so, she just had to imagine this was HER grandfather. Not that she knew who that was. Or who her true father and mother were. But if she did know, she'd want the person on the other end of the phone to be patient, right? She'd only worked at Gek-Help a week, but she liked that it offered a chance to help people. Some were rude, yes, but they needed help nonetheless.
"Mr. Abigail, freezing," she added add ice cubes around the unhappy computer she'd been drawing. "Is just a term to explain that your computer suddenly stopped what it was doing. Sorry about that. A lot of computers just need some diagnostics and clean up. Like…an oil change for your car, only with software. I have this file I can send you that should help. We'll run it together, then I'll delete it from your computer and hopefully you'll be all set."
It was a bad idea to run the software, her survival instinct argued with her crusader instinct.
But it will help, said the knight in armor.
But it' s unapproved, the survivor fought back.
In the brief time Emma had been with Gek-Help, she'd taken it upon herself to develop an executable file that did diagnostics. She was going to tell management about it soon…soonish. But the company she worked for, '877-Gek-Help', wasn't the most progressive when it came to things like this. They preferred that their technicians follow a verbal script of suggestions.
They also recorded and monitored phone calls. But, the crusader inside her countered, this was only the second time she had offered the .exe file. She just wanted to see it in action a few times before offering it up as a real tool. It didn't help that she believed they'd shoot it down when she did bring it forward. Her little projects kept her sane and, she hoped, they would keep her out of trouble. Her parole office did suggest she find an outlet for the creativity that computers brought out of her.
Making her decision, she brought up a remote access tool and Mr. Abigail gave her permission to remote into his PC. She uploaded her script to his computer and had him double-click it on his end . It began to bring up basic data about his machine: when it had last been rebooted, last had a defrag run, how many errors it was seeing in the logs, how old the drives were, what the average CPU, memory and disk usage was, and so on. In five minutes, not only had it run basic diagnostics, it had also begun running actions on the PC that should help with the issues it found.
"Okay, that's it." Emma said cheerfully as the script brought up the message, 'Computer Awesomeness achieved! Nice job!' "So let's have you access your email and see if we can't get those pictures."
A few minutes later, the now jubilant grandfather had his photos and was thanking her profusely. Emma grinned and added an arm making a muscle to the CPU unit of her unhappy computer sketch. "Not a problem Mr. Abigail. Thanks for calling Gek Help."
She put her phone into 'do not receive calls' mode for a moment and reached in her desk for another notebook. In this one, she noted how long it took her little program to run and a couple of thoughts about what else she could add. With a small smile, she glanced back to her drawing and shaded in some of the ice to make it more clear that it was, in fact, ice. She was about to go into 'receive calls' mode again when an instant message popped up on her screen from her supervisor.
Hi Emma, could you come to my office for a few minutes?
Everything but the words blinking at her on the screen fell away as dread crept up Emma's spine with tiny clawed caterpillar legs. It was possible that this was nothing. Possible, but…
There was always a kind of denial one lived in when on borrowed time. Time was a constant. It was so easy to forget about it, to take it for granted. Emma tried not to be blind or too deeply in denial. She'd figured she had three weeks before her background check came back. It had only been 7 days. She'd hoped she could make a big enough mark and maybe, maybe that would forestall the inevitable. The other possibility was simply that Mr. Green was monitoring her call and wanted to ask her about the tool.
She needed this job. A two hundred dollar gap existed between rent due and money in her bank account. She'd been living on ramen noodles and cheap frozen pizza. Her made wheezing noises every time she tried to start it. She'd been desperate to somehow earn her way, to try and turn the corner into a new life.
Okay, she told herself, it could be coincidence. She looked down at herself. She was wearing the required Gek Help polo shirt and khaki pants. It wasn't tucked in so that was not quite up to par with the dress code. Maybe that was it?
She typed out a response, 'Sure, Mr. Green. BRT'
Standing, she tucked her shirt in and tried to still her galloping heart. Her hands had gone cold. She talked to herself as she moved.
"This is going to be fine," She muttered under her breath. "They don't know yet. This isn't a big deal. Don't get ahead of yourself."
The reassurances to herself stopped when she came within view of Mr. Green's glass door. In the room with him she could see a man and woman, both in suits. Okay that was ominous, But, it still didn't mean something was wrong, right? It could be anything. Maybe they wanted - her agile mind blanked and stalled.
She pushed open the glass door as Mr. Green motioned her inside.
"Emma, please sit down." Green said.
"This is Mrs. Hansen and Mr. Perrillo from HR." That line gave away why she was here, and if that hadn't, the empathetic look the lady offered would have. Mr. Perillo handed Emma a piece of paper with a portion highlighted in yellow.
"Miss Swan," Her tone perfected the shade of an HR professional about to give someone bad news. "as you know, your employment with the company is considered temporary - a grace period, if you will - until your background check comes back. It is assumed when you start that the background check will come back clear."
"And I lied on my application." Emma said quietly, beating the others in the room to the punch.
Mrs. Hansen fell silent, as if she had been thrown off for just a moment on her planned speech. "Your background check came back listing that you are a convicted felon." Green and Perrillo nodded in stereo, as if they had planned it.
Emma's eyes drifted around the room. They'd already decided. She knew it. Could feel it. It was something that felt so ultimately familiar – people deciding she wasn't worth it.
"I'm good at this job. My stats are good. I'm always a half hour early. And I've been working on this diagnostic tool that could save the techs time…" She looked to Green, hoping he might at least agree with some of what she said. He said nothing, his expression blank.
"Would you have hired me if I had listed it?" Emma said, a note of frustration in her voice. "Would I have even had a chance? You have no idea how many places I applied before I tried here. Grocery stores, other tech companies, convenience stores, even a few jobs as a waitress. None of them - ."
They trio remained unmoved. "Miss Swan," Mr Green interrupted. "Company policy about lying on your application is very clear."
"I was hoping that maybe if you got a chance to know me. Maybe you'd be able to look past something I did that was a mistake. A mistake I served eighteen months for. Isn't there some way I could - "
"Miss Swan, it is not an option for you to remain with this company."
Emma knew better, she knew so much better than to ask. Throughout her life, people giving her a chance had been rare.
A college professor had told Emma there was power in quantifying things. That lesson, out of all the lessons she had at her year-long stay in college stayed with her. One way she could have currently quantified her life was with the number thirty-eight, the number of job applications she filled out in the last three months before landing this job. She might also use the number two which represented the number of people in her life who actually gave a fuck about her.
She could have, but one night in a bar she decided on a far more accurate means to quantify the trajectory of her life. Two variables defined life. Variable A represented 'How good a life are you providing for yourself' on a 1- 100 scale. Variable B represented 'how much good are you doing around you'. In both cases 100 was where she thought she should be if she was doing everything right i.e., living up to her potential. She rated herself on her perception of both variable A and variable B, then averaged things out. She acknowledged that as the whole formula was based on her perception, it was flawed so, when she was feeling generous she gave herself a +/- 5 to her score.
She called the formula the 'Pertential scale', named after the words 'perception' and 'potential'. It required her to make up a word, of course, but anything in the name of science. To quantify it further, she came up with the Hermit line. The Hermit line was if her 'Pertential' score ever got below 10%. If she ever got there, she figured, she might well pack it in and go and live in a cave like a hermit.
Pertential=(Variable A + Variable B)/2
Emma judged herself to be a 35 on Variable A and 15 on Variable B, which meant an unimpressive score of 25%. Some movement was normal on the scale, and she thought that most people saw themselves in the high seventies. Something bad would happen to them, adjusting them down a few percentage points only to go back up or higher as they moved ahead with their lives. Hers, though, seemed stuck at 25%.
The thing she tried not to think about was that being that low on the scale sucked. Being that low….hurt. It always hurt. It made her feel like a child in a crowd of adults - each of them just so much bigger than she was. They all saw something in front of them, something bright and happy, that she couldn't. She wasn't tall enough.
The three people in the room with her, serving as her judge and jury, waited for further reaction or argument. Emma shook her head, trying to come up with another logical argument. Another line of defense that would somehow, because of the mathematical correctness of the line of thought, save this job for her and penetrate the bureaucracy she was now attacked with.
"I'm sorry, Emma." Green rounded his desk, extending his hand to her. She took it numbly, still trying to think of a way out of this.
"Security will escort you back to your desk to pick up your belongings. They'll walk you to the door and collect your badge from you." Mrs. Hansen was saying. "We'll send you your paycheck. Best of luck to you, Miss Swan."
Emma reddened with humiliation. A large security guard waited outside the office, holding a box. She hadn't met very many people in her week with the company, but everyone would see her being paraded back to her desk and out of the building.
"No." Emma stated. Her fight or flight response had kicked in. "I'm walking out now. Not to my desk, just out. If you want security to escort me, they better keep up."
With that, she strode as fast as she could down the hallway and toward the front door. She paused when she reached the exit and took off her badge, tossing it in the otherwise empty box. She started to leave then sighed and turned back to the guard. "On my desk, there's this bakery bag. Would you do me a solid and grab it for me? Please?" she asked, her voice feeling rough and dry. Her eyes beseeched him. He nodded at her, allowing her to avoid the full embarrassment of this moment. It was a small mercy but one she was grateful for.
Her drawings were abandoned. She should have known not to get too comfortable. She tried to reclaim a small modicum of dignity by taking a huge handful of candy from the reception's desk and shoving it in her pocket.
She walked unsteadily to her small yellow, rusty Volkswagon bug. Like most of the employees, she parked in the second parking lot from the corporate office. It was a decent hike, but for once she didn't feel it. It was 95 degrees and the heat didn't seem to touch her, so lost was she in what had happened, in the shock of it, in the self-mockery for feeling shock in the first place. She should have known. She should have been better prepared.
She unlocked the car and got in, resting her brow against the steering wheel despite the heat and the burn against her skin. She slowly put the key into the ignition and turned. The car made a choking, half-hearted clicking and whirring sounds it always did. This time, though, nothing came after it. The engine did not jump to life. She tried again. Clicking and whirring and then silence.
She turned the key once more. The car still did not start.
Fuck. She slapped her hand on the dashboard hard. "Fuck. Come on." But the car wasn't listening to her. Each subsequent attempt yielded the same result. It was on the eighth or ninth attempt that she realized she was crying.
Emma placed the cupcake from Murray's Bakery on the center of her kitchen countertop and stared at it. On her phone was a message from David and Mary Margaret. She knew she should check it. She also knew what she would find. Her former foster parents always called on her birthday, they always sang. They said they loved her. She managed it by never picking up during certain times of year. She just...couldn't.
She met David when she was fifteen. He taught at a computer class at the local YMCA and Emma used it to avoid going home. She never expected he'd become a constant in her life. She met his wife Mary Margret not long after. She liked them. They were open, listened well and rated as cool in her teenage mind, mostly because they knew how to hack things. She didn't trust anyone, not really, but they earned more trust than anyone ever had. Six months later, they completed training and paperwork to become foster parents. She knew they did it for her.
Not long after they'd taken her in, they asked about adopting her. She'd said no. She never called them 'mom' and 'dad.' After she turned eighteen she left their home and started to travel, earning money by doing less than legal things. They chased her with phone calls, texts and Skype. They wore her down until she surrendered to their desire to have a place in her life. Secretly, Emma loved how stubborn they were about it. At the end of every communication came those three little words.
She never said it back.
Besides, if she answered the phone today, they'd ask her how the job was going and she couldn't bear to tell them she'd failed. Again.
Emma took off her 'work-shirt' - a long sleeved blue shirt she'd found at a thrift store for five bucks. The heater in her apartment had two settings - frozen tundra and surface of the sun. She'd already begun to sweat and she'd been here three minutes. She complained to the landlord three times but he didn't even look up from his newspaper the last time she told him. She found a sleeveless shirt where she'd abandoned it on her desk chair.
She turned back to the bakery bag. She should blow out a candle and eat the cupcake, right? It was traditional. She hadn't thought to get a candle, so she substituted a very old match from a very old matchbook. The whole thing felt like her life – especially lately – a shadow of something life-like.
She took a deep breath to blow out the matchstick, and then a knock came at the door, effectively startling the hell out of her. She knocked her knee against the countertop causing pain to ring over and over in the spot she'd bashed into the laminate counter. The cupcake flopped to one side, match and all.
"Shit, shit shit." Emma muttered, grasping her knee. She huffed at the matchstick, blowing it out before it burned the counter or set something on fire. A knocked over birthday cupcake seemed about right. Her score on the Pertential Scale fell from 25 to 20.
"Emma Swan?" Knocking came at her door again. "It's the police."