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It was a long, tiring and repetitive weekend. The teams had worked until late on Friday night before packing up and leaving to come back early Saturday morning.
The forum erupted overnight, and now Sammy was going through each thread trying to find useful problem reports buried in amongst the mass of vitriol and complaints. Darryl went through the server logs, trying to find helpful information, but hadn’t had much luck. Noah had called in a couple of the more senior programmers and had them doing a code review while he checked the design to see if there was a flaw in the system. A few of the QA team had come in as well, but Charlie was conspicuous in her absence. Those who had turned up were trying to reproduce the problem, some of them trying random actions, others going through the reports that Sammy forwarded to them from the forums to see if that would help reproduce the issue.
Allee continued providing food and drinks and trying to help everyone stay focused. She could feel the frustration permeate the office, with the unasked question of 'how could this have happened?' at the forefront of everyone's mind. They worked late into the night again, without any significant progress.
On Sunday, the mood in the office was grim. Noah, Darryl and Sammy were there, but Charlie was again absent. This was noted as some of the others began to grouse about her lack of commitment. Everyone continued their work with sober determination.
It was mid-morning when one of the QA team, Gareth Preston, approached Noah with a look of embarrassed triumph. Allee had just finished making the coffee round and was bringing Noah's over when he stood and bolted for Gareth's desk, Gareth not far behind him. Allee stopped, deciding to keep a hold of Noah's coffee and just stay out of the way. Five minutes later, Noah returned to his workstation, fingers flying over the keyboard. Watching to see if he needed anything, Allee saw Noah call Gareth over.
“Sit here and see if you can make it happen again,” Noah said. As Gareth got to work, Noah paced behind him, a frown on his face. He glanced up. Allee didn't want to disturb his train of thought, but she was also eaten up with curiosity. Had they had a breakthrough? Allee could see that Noah was focused on his work, so she let him be, heading back to her own desk to log who had come in to work over the weekend.
As she came back an hour later to get lunch orders, Noah stood up at his desk and addressed the room.
“Guys, I think I know what's gone wrong. Come and see what you make of this.” Everyone moved over to Noah's desk, Allee included, even though she did not really understand what was being said. “Alright, we've got a loop in the updater,” Noah explained. “It's going around in circles doing the same stuff over and over again. Seems to be fairly difficult to trigger, and although there are some base prerequisites, like needing to do some updates, there's other specific triggers that also need to happen.”
Bob Crowley, one of the programmers who had come in at Noah's behest, interjected, “But surely we can pick up dependency loops and deal with that?”
“Yeah, normally we do, but in this case, something is upsetting that.”
As the conversation became more technical, the language flew right over Allee's head. She moved to the kitchenette to give herself something to do while waiting for the discussion to end. Twenty minutes later, she heard Noah giving instructions, splitting them up into groups. Allee looked up to see Noah walking towards her.
“Right, we've figured out what has happened,” he told her, “although now we need to figure out why it has happened and what we're going to do about it.”
“I don't really understand what was just said. I know you've found the bug, but apart from that, it was all gobbledygook to me.” Allee looked apologetically to Noah, feeling a little ridiculous and ignorant. Noah smiled at her and then explained it to her in a way she understood.
“It's okay, most people wouldn't have had any idea what I'd said. It’s all technical jargon. Basically, it means that to trigger the bug, you would need to have out-of-date content, which would trigger the update. It starts off knowing it needs to update one thing, but in doing that update, it discovers it needs to update other things as well. At some point, while updating those 'other things', it finds some more things to update. So at least one thing there will be something that was in the previous list, and this creates a self-replicating loop, but for some reason, it doesn't realise this, so is unable to complete the update.”
“How did you manage to find it?”
“Actually, it was Gareth. It reminded him of something he'd seen a while ago, and he claims to have logged a bug about it, but I don't remember ever seeing it. Stuff like this should have come through from QA! Where the hell is Charlie anyway?” Noah tugged his hands through his hair. “I'd love to see how she'd explain this one since she's the one who's responsible for making sure bugs like these get through to us! I wonder how many other bugs there are, just hanging about in limbo. I think I know what one of my jobs will be this afternoon, although if she'd given a shit like the rest of us, she would already be here to take care of that!”
All Allee could do was be a soundboard for Noah's frustrations.
Feeling as though she’d not slept at all, Allee knew that those who had been at the studio all weekend would not be in a cheerful mood today, especially not with what had been discovered. Charlie would be persona non-grata. Charlie had always given Allee the impression that she was dedicated to her job and had worked long hours before the release. So why hadn’t she made an appearance?
Arriving at work, Allee saw that Darryl and Noah were already there, working on the servers' temporary fix. Determined not to disturb them, Allee headed into her office to get ready to send the overtime logs to Head Office. She sat at her computer, watching as people walked past her door until the studio settled down to work for the day. It had gone nine o’clock, and Craig was in his office when Allee heard the studio door open and footsteps walking towards the main workspace. She quickly got up from behind her desk and made it to her doorway just as Charlie passed by.
“Charlie, a word? Come in and close the door, please.”
Charlie stiffly walked in after Allee, closing the door with a sharp click, before sullenly slumping in the chair Allee indicated towards. Moving behind her desk, Allee missed Charlie wincing in discomfort. She got straight to the point. “You are Miss-unpopular right now, did you know that? Before you say anything, I saw you on Friday. I saw that look. You knew. You knew, and you said nothing, did nothing. You walked out that door knowing full well what the problem was and left the rest of your colleagues to spend their entire weekend trying to find, and then fix, your screw-up.”
Surprisingly, Charlie did not bite back. Instead, she slumped in her chair, quietly answering.
“I know. I feel shitty about it, and it's been on my mind all weekend. I just couldn't come in.”
“Why not? What was so important that you couldn't even let someone know what the bug was? Why leave them hanging like that?”
Despite having had the weekend off, Charlie looked exhausted.
“It was Parker, my boyfriend. I'd promised him that we'd do something he wanted to do this weekend, because I'd been working so much over the last few weeks. When I said I might need to come in over the weekend, he flew off the handle. He was just so mad, I couldn't do it.” Charlie shifted uncomfortably in her chair, and this time Allee saw the painful grimace cross Charlie's face.
Dread invaded the pit of Allee's stomach. She was all too familiar with the actions and guarded expressions Charlie was exhibiting.
“What did he do to you?” she asked quietly, her gaze sympathetic yet direct.
“Nothing, why would you-”
“Don't bullshit me, Charlie. I've been there, I know that look, I know how to evade. What did he do to you?”
