VirileMail/2

Bugs
By Friday I was really messed up. I had only about ten hours of sleep total for the previous three nights. I had developed some new obsession with watching late night television. At first I just thought I was having trouble adjusting to a new work routine of the 12 hour shifts. And, of course, I was also puzzled by the strange events at work, particularly Brian's behavior and the mysterious holes blasted in the floors of the building. But not as puzzled as I should have been.

At work, the rumor that seemed to be winning was some story about the holes being caused by a high velocity micrometeorite that had hit the building. When word leaked out about the damage to the building, a local news station came and did a story, playing up the meteorite theory and including an interview with Geisler and another interview with an astronomy professor at the State University.

None of our customers seemed to care about the short service interruption and by Friday I was regretting having to meet with Erin. It seemed like we had not dodged a bullet from outer space, but as long as the network and my job were both steady, I was satisfied.

It was about 3:30 Friday morning before I finally fell asleep. I had just spent five hours surfing television stations, not spending more than about a minute on a station before clicking on to the next one. Not my usual cup of tea, and it was so out of character that it should have sent me in search of a psychiatrist. But at that time I was not aware of how bizarre my behavior was.

As tired as I was, I woke up at 6:15 and took a shower. I woke from a strange dream- like an Indiana Jones movie full of bugs…..but in my dream they were bugs on my computer work station. I felt like I had bugs crawling on me and I leaped out of bed and ran to the shower.

The sensation of something on my skin never really went away. I shaved twice and then stood looking in the mirror for ten minutes trying to see what was crawling up my nose and into my ears. I got to work early and sent Fred home. He did not complain about ending his shift early. For a while we talked about the idea of getting a temp to fill in the next time one of the three network administrators went on vacation. I promised Fred I would discuss the idea with Erin when I saw her later that day.

When Fred left, I sat at my desk scratching my persistent itches and waiting for the 10:00 meeting with Erin. I had installed a cheap webcam in the server room, and every day I reviewed the previous day’s video. I has the system set up to save a video frame to hard disk every second. I was using a software hack that would flag any frame that was significantly different from the preceding frame. So far, I had 17 roach sightings and three requests to the custodial staff for a solution to the bug problem.

I was wondering if there was any link between my itches, the roaches, and the hole in the back of the server room, when Brian came to my office. It was only 9:30. Brian wanted to make plans for the meeting with Erin.