Fairy Dust - 2. Embarrassment

Sam checked into the hotel close to noon after being stuck in freakishly bad traffic for a few hours. As he was depositing his suitcase in the room he heard movement behind the wall. When he came out he saw Fred exiting the next room. They went to lunch together and then went to check on the ailing computers. The head of the small company greeted them with a look of anxiety. He explained that their IT person had suddenly quit. When the problems started there was no one to fix them. The worried man quickly ushered Sam and Fred into the server room. It was a cramped closet-like space with cables tangled into spider webs hanging everywhere.

After a few hours of sorting out what was connected to what and tracking down a few passwords the problem became apparent. The main server had almost no memory left. The amount of data that the company needed stored should have been easily accommodated by the terabytes of disk space. No one seemed to know what was filling up the rest. The only thing left to do was to sort through the directories and find out what was in them.

As Sam and Fred went through the data one of the managers watched over their shoulder.

"OK, so looks like we have a bunch of spreadsheets in this one," said Fred as he scanned the list.

"Those are our sales records," explained the manager.

"OK, lets see here," said Sam, "Looks like more spreadsheets."

"All those are important," said the manager pointing to a group of directories.

"What's that one on the bottom?" asked Sam pointing to a cryptically named directory.

"I don't know," answered the manager scratching his head.

Fred opened the directory and found that it was full of video files. "Jeez, those are huge! What are they? Training videos?"

"No we shouldn't have any videos," answered the manager looking perplexed.

"Maybe someone started their own private video library here. Lets check one and see what they are," suggested Sam.

The file names were not suggestive of their content so Fred chose one at random. As the video software started up they all stared at the screen. The movie started playing and to everyone's surprise it showed two men showering together. It took a moment for everyone to react. As them men in the video started kissing Fred stopped the video. Sam closed his eyes and shook his head trying to drive the image away.

After a moment of shocked silence Fred started laughing. "Someone's really been having fun," he said giving the embarrassed manager a big smile.

The offending files were quickly removed and the server was soon back in working order. They would have to put some restrictions on what could be stored on the disks and by whom the following day.

"That's going to be easy," remarked Fred over dinner, "We just alter a few things in the user accounts and the rest of Friday in ours!"

"Yeah, that's gonna be sweet," agreed Sam taking a bite of his steak.

"Can you believe that video collection? The guy must have spent a lot of time downloading all that stuff," said Fred impressed by the huge files that had gone unnoticed.

Sam watched Fred laugh and forced himself to laugh along, but he found it more disturbing than funny. He did not like his own reaction to the video. He had almost liked something about it. Fortunately, Fred did not seem to notice Sam's discomfort. He continued to laugh at the state of affairs at the client company and made jokes until they reached the hotel. As they went to their rooms Fred gave Sam a little pat on the back and wished him good night. He saw Sam tense up and enjoyed the discomfort he had caused.