Gym Bitch

2 - Needed a reason to strike up a conversation.

"I see..." Cass was pacing back and forth on the balcony when she noticed that the two men from earlier were now talking and glancing over at her, presumably talking about her.

"So today there were only two people working during working hours, I just started like an hour ago." She knew he wasn't trying to make an excuse, but God, did he sound like it. It was rather funny. "Apparently, there was a network issue and they were working on different parts of the code and they sort of... saved it on top of each other."

"I'm not sure I understand..." Truth be told, she kind of missed a couple of sentences while thinking about what the men inside could be talking about her.

"You see, we're missing one of the functions one of the guys was writing, but we don't know what exactly yet. And there seem to be problems with the rest of the code as well. Basically, even the parts that used to run yesterday are not running properly now. It's gonna take a lot of time to debug it and find what exactly went wrong."

"So, worst case, we've lost... 17 work hours, yes?" She asked mostly rhetorically. "8 hours each for them and this 1 hour for you?"

"How is that worst case?" He seemed genuinely confused.

"Well, we reset it to the last backup and redo today's work?" 

"The last backup is from 3 days ago," he simply stated.

"Okay... I'll check and do the math, we can absorb the setback. I'll send out notifications for the update to everyone tomorrow." It really didn't seem like that big of a deal. Was Jack testing her to see how she'd react by making it sound bad?

"There's something else, too."

"I'm listening..."

"The architecture design was lost."

"W-" Cass was speechless. "How? How is that even possible?"

"I- I'm not sure..."

"So... Has anyone contacted the software architect? Do they have a backup?"

"He's not working for us anymore."

"O-okay... Let me get back to you in a bit." 

Speechless was an understatement. The architecture design was the basis for the entire product. It contained the organizational structure of all files used in the project. All of the server-side software was based on it. Without it, they would have to start from below zero: 

They'd need a new software architect to be introduced to the project so they can draft a new structure, which would have to be tested, approved, and then broken down to be documented. Said documentation, containing detailed instructions on how the architecture's intended to be used, would then become the spine of the new project plan Cass would have to create.

She called her boss, who picked up almost immediately.

"Lukas," she started, suddenly realizing she didn't actually know where to start. "Have you heard what's going on in the Dev department?"

"I will now," he chuckled on the phone.

She explained everything to him, some things a few times, until he was finally on the same page.

"Do we have any legal basis to contact the software architect?" Cass asked hopefully.

"Let me check who that is..." She heard the 50-something-year-old man sigh on the other end of the line. 

I agree.

There probably was a visible path underneath her feet, that she'd personally created in the last half an hour. She continued pacing back and forth, freezing in the January late-night winds.