The Ascendant

Chapter Fifty-Five

A hand snaked through the lift doors, preventing them from closing.

‘Morning Ben,’ said Rob, squeezing his way in.

‘Morning Rob,’ I replied. Rob took a couple of deep breaths as he regained his composure, shuffling up along side me at the rear of the lift.

‘What time did you get out last night Ben?’

‘Probably not that much later than you. A little after ten. It feels like I haven’t been away.’

‘Yeah, I know what you mean.’ The doors opened and I made a hand gesture to allow Rob to walk out before me. We headed over to our section of the office, readying ourselves for any grilling which Hobbs may have in store for us both; last night's animosity beyond either of our energy levels.

We started our computers and I put the kettle on, suddenly feeling nervous and regretful of my hasty actions of the previous night.

‘Drink Rob?’

‘Please Ben.’

I knocked on Hobbs’s door and offered to make him one also. ‘No,’ he replied. I think he had one on the go already.

I heard Rob begin to mutter confusedly under his breath as I stirred the sugar into his coffee. I turned and placed the mug on his desk and headed back to mine, taking a tentative sip of the piping hot brew just to fill a couple of seconds.

‘Fuxgoinon,’ I heard Rob mumble edgily as I sat down, turning my attention to my own computer screen. I highlighted the spreadsheet I had been working on yesterday and clicked the Print icon, prompting seven or eight pages of dense script to spew from the printer’s mouth.

A pen or pencil was flung across Rob’s desk and I glanced across at my agitated colleague, his face a reflection of the turbulent emotions he must have been racing his way through: bewilderment, fear, anxiety, torment – they were all there as his panicked eyes gave me a five second peep show of his soul. It was a harrowing experience for us both, but thankfully Rob was completely locked into his own little prism of darkness and didn’t notice me staring-in.

‘Everything OK over there Rob?’, I asked, hoping my voice remained even; concerned but not tremulous, knowing or guilty.

‘I don’t know,’ he said, squinting at his computer screen whilst distractedly rubbing his scalp with one hand. ‘My quarterly report seems to have vanished.’

‘Vanished? Rob, what are you talking about?’ I walked slowly across the office to help him investigate the problem.

‘I’m talking about that fucking report which I spent all fucking day yesterday compiling Ben! I saved it before I left the office last night and now it’s fucking gone!’

‘Rob it can’t have just vanished. Do you remember where you saved it exactly?’ I leant over Rob’s desk, straining to get a closer look at the screen as if that would enable me to find the erstwhile file.

‘I saved it in My Documents folder, like I always do. Here, you have a look.’ Rob pushed himself back from the desk, allowing me access to his mouse and keyboard. He gave me the document name and I carried out a thorough search of his hard drive, actually hoping to find the damned thing. Meanwhile, Rob gibbered behind me, his tone becoming ever higher and more desperate.

‘It’s not there,’ I told him as I stood away from the keyboard. Rob looked at me and then back to the computer, and then back to me again. He looked mad with frustration or fury. Had he worked it out?

‘Didn’t you just keep a back-up copy Rob?’

‘What do you think?’

‘A paper copy?’

Rob lurched over, grimly tugging at the tufts of hair to the sides of his head, his knuckles whitening as he did so.

I squatted down beside him, putting a reassuring arm over his shoulders. I whispered to him, ‘Don’t panic Rob, I’ll call the IT boys, see if they can’t sort it out. I’m sure it’s on there somewhere, we just don’t know where to find the fucking thing. Come on Rob, it’ll be all right, you’ll see.’

It was still a couple of minutes before seven so I left a message on the Information Technology Department’s voicemail, stressing the urgency of the situation, and clipped my own report together before delivering it to Hobbs. I told Hobbs about Rob’s mystifying mishap but assured him we were looking into the problem.

‘Well what about his back up copy?’

‘Unfortunately he forgot to back his files up last night. It had been a really long day.’

‘Don’t make fucking excuses for him Ben. Get him in here now.’

I told Rob that Hobbs had demanded his immediate presence and he slunk off in the appropriate direction but appeared to have left his spirit somewhere else. He entered Hobbs’s office a defeated man and left it an utterly annihilated one. While all this was going on, I continued to try to get through to IT but still no-one was available.

A young Cockney man from the IT Dept returned my call a few minutes after nine, managing to sound both leisurely and inconvenienced at the same time. I explained Rob’s misfortune.

‘Sounds like he’s forgotten to save it in the first place,’ he opined. ‘Either that or he’s fucked it.’

‘What does that mean?’

The Cockney man ran through the simple functions of a computer’s hard drive, stressing that it was not possible to delete files without a user hitting the delete key or a virus contaminating the records.

‘So what can we do?’

‘Turn the computer off and then switch it back on again.’

‘And what if that doesn’t work?’

‘Call me back.’

The Cockney man just sounded further put-out when I called him back. ‘It’s still not there,’ I told him. He gave me a list of rudimentary checks to carry out, and I wrote them all down, having strangely convinced myself that there truly was hope for Rob, who hovered anxiously at my shoulder, waiting for some magic which would return what was rightfully his. None of them worked of course, and I had to leave Rob to his own devices as he tried in vain to extract a solution from the whiz-kid at the other end of the line.

Hobbs’s idiot-tolerance level was at an all time low as I entered his office with a blank pad and an even blanker expression.

‘Close the door Ben. Sit down. It is not going well is it?’

‘I’m not sure I’m with you Paul.’

‘That is precisely what worries me Ben.’ We went through the report line by line, unfavourably comparing my performance with Mike, Joost and Angela, each of whom could do no wrong. Twenty minutes into our meeting Hobbs broke off, rushing out to discuss Rob’s distressing situation with the Cockney man from IT. I sat in Hobbs’s office, watching him dictate terms to the Cockney man while Rob set about gnawing his way through his lower lip.

‘Fucking arsehole,’ said Hobbs, bursting back into his office, though he didn’t divulge who he was talking about. If pressed, I’d guess he would have said both of them and me as well, so I kept quiet and waited for him to speak.

Hobbs hissed more disdainful comments at me and dished out a frightful mauling, clawing and kicking at my soft underbelly, cuffing and biting me whenever I tried to escape. Just as I thought he was going in for the kill, he stepped back which allowed me to squeal my protest, promising the next couple of weeks would enliven my results and bring about my redemption. ‘I’m so close,’ I sobbed.

Hobbs glared back at me, his tense, bunched lips whitening as he contemplated his next move.

‘I’ll think about it. Now go and get me that other dickhead.’