Close Enough For Government Work

by Stephen D. Rogers

Before I was able to quit working, I was the computer Help Desk at a large municipality.  In that role, I supported 350 users, which translated to 350 people with urgent problems and my telephone number.

I had users who could lose my tax payments, ticket me for doing 21 in a 20 mph zone, and reassess my neighborhood out of existence. The town counsel was unable to access his CD-ROM for forty-three minutes and the lawsuit against me is still pending.

There were more than a few 40-year old white males who worked at the town, many of whom owned guns and carried them on a daily basis. In the municipal offices alone, three people had mental breakdowns in as many years. When I responded to the call "Can't print," there was a real chance that I might not return.

You may well wonder why I risked my life for a municipal paycheck when everyone knows that I could have made more money out in the real world. To be completely honest, there were hidden benefits.

I didn't need to buy a coffee on the way into work because every morning there was at least one grateful user who hadn't been able to login either because the power supply in their PC died or they forgot the password that they'd used every day for the last six months.

When a police officer clocked me doing 60 in a school zone, he gave me a verbal warning rather than a ticket since he had recently needed to have an important file restored from the backup tapes. I didn't even have to make a big deal of it.  He simply realized that he might accidentally delete another file and have to come begging.

When the water pump on my car went, the maintenance garage supervisor got me one at cost and installed it for nothing. He had needed help setting up a free Internet email account.

My reclassification paperwork was approved quicker than expected after the CFO had a problem with the links in his budget files ten minutes before an important meeting with the Finance Committee.

It wasn't just that I helped people. I learned things.

I removed adulterous email from jammed printers, fixed the footer in confidential letters, added bulleted indents to resumes, and formatted the cash deposit spreadsheets.

I was everywhere and nowhere.  I had keys to police substations, access to every room that had a network jack, and the password of every user who needed a printer added and tested while they were out of the office.

The perks stopped being enough. The weight of carrying 350 users was becoming excessive, and I decided that I wanted out. Since I couldn't save a dime on my salary, I needed a stake to tide me over before I could quit.

I started to develop a plan.

From a letter to her brother which was printing outside the margins, I knew that Stacy at the Treasurer's Office was recently divorced and desperately looking for a partner who could help with the household bills. I also knew from my time in the office that Stacy was the person who made the trips to the bank to make the daily deposits.

You might be surprised at how many people come in off the street with cash in hand. They are buying bus passes, paying parking tickets, settling overdue water and sewer bills. They are mailed statements, are asked to pay by charge card, and still they face the local parking situation to come to the window with cash for excise, real estate, and personal property taxes.

Since Stacy already had means and opportunity, I needed to give her an overwhelming motive to disappear with a day's cash.  After all, she probably only had twenty years left before she could retire with eighty percent.

While I had to provide the motivation, I couldn't afford to be the motivation. I had no interest in doing time for the crime, nor spending my free hours with someone who thought that listening to old people complain about having to pay their real estate taxes was a meaningful career.

I needed to create someone who would give Stacy reason to act, a love interest perhaps.  Opening a free Internet email account under the name Roger Steele, I subscribed to a list server for get-rich-quick schemes. Using the name ManOfSteele, I started spending time in the singles chat rooms though I wasn't sure if that could be discovered during a police investigation.

When the calendar above Stacy's desk told me that she had a dentist appointment the next morning, I sent a torrid email to her account at work from Roger after she had left for the day but before the daily backups ran.

The next morning I logged in with her password (she had needed a modem installed) and replied to Roger's email, saying that she was close to taking the day's receipts and meeting him at the cottage. Then I deleted Roger's email and Stacy's copy of her reply.

His mail to her would be on the backup, and her mail to him would be on record with his email provider. While I knew that most of the detective squad couldn't find their way out of a dialogue box, I hoped that they were competent at their jobs.

Then I waited for a rainy day, holding my breath and biting my tongue.

I explained to users that they couldn't enter the words "Didn't say" in the telephone number field, demonstrated for the millionth time how to reset a print server, tried not to answer their question with my initial thought: "If you don't know what you did when you're the one who did it, how do you expect me to know when I wasn't even here?"

The few times I was in the Treasurer's Office and Stacy wasn't at her desk, I sent a quick email to Roger telling him that we would be together soon. She was just waiting for the right deposit. I deleted her copy of the message and told anyone who asked that I had been working on her network settings or trying to improve her PC performance.

Thursday morning drizzled, and then the afternoon developed into a torrential downpour. The time was right.

Stacy walked the deposit to the bank about three o'clock which was lucky as that was also the time that the shifts changed at the police department. While I drove up alongside Stacy and offered her a lift, most of the police officers were either gathered in the Roll Call room waiting to go out or parked behind a store trying to finish up their paperwork so that they could leave for the day.

Stacy folded up her dripping umbrella and entered my car with a smile. "Leaving early today?"

"No, I'm on my way to Fire Headquarters.  They're having problems accessing the Public Safety system."

As the bank wasn't more than a few blocks away, I had to act quickly, pulling the plastic bag tightly over her head and hanging on for dear life. The rain-pelted windows kept anyone outside from seeing what was happening inside, and eventually she stopped struggling.

I headed for the swamp on the other side of the tracks, knowing that I needed to be quick because in fact I did need to go to Fire Headquarters and they were certain to notice the time that I arrived.

As the swamp had once been a nice lake, there was a road that ran around it. As it was no longer a nice lake, the road was usually deserted and I had no problems finding a place to pull over. Making sure that no one was coming around the corner, I opened the passenger door and dragged Stacy through some underbrush before reaching the edge of the water.

As I dumped her body into the swamp, I looked up to see the Conservation Commissioner standing not a hundred yards from me, staring at me from under his green umbrella.  Of all the people who had to catch me disposing of the body, it had to be the user whose soundcard I had just disabled because it was conflicting with his other devices.

There are newspapers available in jail, and I've been following the case against the Commissioner with some satisfaction. It seems that he had been testing the water only after a rain so that the pollution counts were lower this year, something that would look good in the Annual Report which just happened to appear around the time he planned to announce his run for State office.

Unfortunately, there are also computers in jail. My cellmate passed on the nature of my previous job, and now I'm rousted every time a guard has trouble updating his home page.

Sometimes I wonder if Stacy's replacement was any better at correctly cutting and pasting than she was.

Over a hundred of Stephen D. Rogers stories and poems have appeared in various publications including BLUE MURDER MAGAZINE, ELLERY QUEEN'S MYSTERY MAGAZINE, and MURDEROUS INTENT.

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