Life's like that!

Even by the standards of his terrible job, the day had been bad.

It had started with his car breaking down on the way to work. It was then he realized that his phone battery was also dead. By the time he finally managed to get in to work, it was as if all hell had broken loose. 

A critical server had crashed. Thanks to his company’s belt-tightening efforts, the backup server, never used operationally until now, was nowhere close to being capable of handling the load now expected of it, rendering it practically unusable. His colleague had decided to call in sick that day – leaving him now to deal with the problem. In other words, fix it.

John, his boss, was in no mood for explanations. “Fix it – then we’ll talk!” he barked at Mike.

Mike didn’t say a word. Getting straight down to business, two hours later, after a lot of searching and testing and rebooting,  voila – the server was up and running again. They were back in business.

“John's cabin. NOW.” came the terse message from John’s secretary.

“It is ok now, John” Mike said, as he entered John's cabin.

“What’s ok? Four hours! FOUR hours we’ve lost today. Do you have ANY idea what that means? Do you know how many orders we’ve lost? How many customers we may have lost? Do you know how difficult it is to retain ONE customer nowadays?”

“Sorry...I did the best I could. It was quite a complicated problem. The system directory…”

“Spare me the details. You walk in one hour late, we can’t get you on the phone – who do you think you are?”

“Sorry, my car broke down. And my phone died too. I didn’t know Jim wouldn’t be in today. Anyway, it’s working now. We really should be getting a faster backup server, John”.

“Sure, why don’t we just get it out of your salary?”

Mike went silent.

“What are you doing still standing here? Have you finished that network configuration schematic that I asked you to work on? I want to see it by end of day today on my desk.”

Mike returned to his desk. The day was only half over but he was already feeling very tired. Oh, how he hated this job! But he needed it. He needed the money. Not for himself, but for his daughter.

Mira. His ten-year old. She’d been five when her mother had died in a fire accident in front of her eyes. She hadn’t spoken a word since.

He’d shown her to every doctor he could. “It’s a trauma case. We can try – but no guarantees”.

 And they’d tried. Without result.

He’d finally taken her to Chicago. A friend had suggested this speciality clinic there. Not very well-known but apparently it had shown some good results for similar cases. It was over a thousand miles away – but he was willing to try ANYTHING.

 “No guarantees, Mr. Wilson” the doctor had said “but we’ll try our best. You can leave her in our care.”

It was expensive – and insurance covered only a fraction of the costs – but it didn’t matter. Mira was all he had. Money was no object.

He’d call up the clinic every week. “We’re working on it” is all they’d say.

The phone rang.

He was in no mood to pick it up. It went to voice mail. “Mr. Wilson, this is Dr. Adams from…”.

He grabbed the receiver.

“Yes, Doctor?”

“Mr. Wilson, somebody wants to speak to you”.

“Papa”.

He froze.

“Papa”.

He couldn’t speak. Tears were flowing down his eyes.

He covered his eyes with his hand.

Nothing, NOTHING, could spoil his day now.

(Pic courtesy morguefile).

This post is written as part of the writetribe  initiative.