VirileMail/6 (archived)

Development
When Judy heard about the new project, she was at first excited. Disappointment came when she found out about her training assignment. Since she really wanted to join the project, I told her I would ask if she could join the VirileMail project as soon as Brad was competent.

I asked Erin about Judy, but she said I should ask Geisler. I asked Geiser, and he said it was fine with him. He would ask Gajduskova, but we could assume there was no problem unless we heard otherwise. I found something amusing in this episode.

I returned to my office, checked up on the project's progress. As usual, I found some software bugs. One was about a flaw in the PNG rendering. In another I found that the client crashed when it tried to view an e-mail with a subject line of more than 254 characters. I made out bug reports about these and a plethora of other bugs. Some of them made who wonder who had written the code in the first place. Part of it was being made by the Czech team, I knew.

Another irritation was the odd interface, which often was indicipherable. It was just a difference, I decided. It made perfect sense to the foreign team. Though Kaede was improving the interface, there was still little in the way of English documentation.

At lunch on Tuesday, as we were discussing the tentative timeline, Fred broke in.

"You know," he said. "I've noticed something."

"What is that?" asked Erin.

"The network is unusualy stable," he elaborated. "Not only that, but there is an increase in transmission rate."

"How much of an increase?" asked Brian. (His strange behavior had lessened somewhat.)

"Actually, it's not a lot," said Fred. "But it's enough to be noticable."

"It's probably not a big deal," I said. "It's like these things remain perfectly constant."

"Well, this is not what we're dealing with," said Fred. "The increase is significant."

"Okay," I resigned. "I'll look into it."

After lunch I double-checked that nothing of note was detected by the security camera. I performed some tests and found that indeed we had a greater transmission rate. The only way that could happen was if there had been an upgrade. If so, I had never been informed of it. There would have to have been some server downtime anyway.

Some more days passed, and Judy and Fred finished training Brad. Judy was allowed to work on VirileMail, since there was no word from Geisler. Judy seemed uncertain what to do, but that was expected. Brian eagerly explained to her what we were doing. Even after that, she never seemed to be with it on the same level as anybody else on the team. And despite his earlier enthusiasm, Brian seemed to dislike her presence.