The I.T. Girl Read Online Free PDF Page B

My mind would empty of METX concerns
in the evening while I considered what to keep and what to throw out and how best
to sort stuff into boxes. Now I felt like I was beginning my next phase of London
life.
    The door phone buzzed and I stretched over my handbag to answer
it.
    ‘Columbus,’ the voice said at the other end. I laughed and buzzed
him in.
    ‘Glad you texted,’ he said coming through the door.
    ‘Me too. I’m enjoying our… what are
we calling it?’
    ‘An arrangement,’ he reminded me and we kissed.
    ‘Would you like anything to drink?’ I asked. ‘I have juice, still.
Don’t mean to ply you with alcohol every time.’
    ‘No, I’m okay thanks. See you’re all packed.’ He looked around.
‘Whoa, how do we... get to the bed?’
    ‘Follow me.’ I crawled over the boxes and landed safely with
a bounce.
    ‘Are they solid?’ he asked, poking the nearest box with his foot.
    ‘Some are. Some aren’t.’
    ‘It’s like that game show from the Eighties,’ he said, feeling
his way.
    ‘If you step on the wrong box you’ll disappear,’ I added.
    He made it across the cardboard vortex and we fell over on the
mattress. Things got serious as we took off each other’s clothes.

 
    My eyes opened a moment before my alarm clock clicked and a siren
filled the room. I banged it quiet and forced myself upright. METX went live in
Asia through the night but as usual I was expected to be in for European start-up.
    ‘We broke the rules.’ He surfaced as I was about to leave. ‘No
sleepovers, remember?’ He constantly made fun of our rules, drunkenly put together
one night after a work party where we discovered, when everyone else had left, that
we still fancied each other, even if a relationship wasn’t on the cards. The only
part I could remember was back at mine, trying to find a notepad to write down the
rules, in between kissing. ‘God, you’re a nerd,’ he had said.
    ‘It’s early. Go back to sleep.’ I picked up my keys. ‘The movers
will be here later but you can just close the door when you’re leaving.’
    ‘Good luck with the rollout.’
    ‘Thanks.’
    ‘Hey.’ He caught my hand at the bedroom door, fingers lacing
briefly with mine. ‘Thanks for the wham-bam, Ma’am.’
    ‘Any time, sugar.’ I leaned over with
a kiss.

 
    I logged in even before sitting down. Everything looked clean.
I checked the Asian indices. All as expected. There were still twenty minutes to
go before the European market opened. The wall clocks showed the time in our main
locations: Sydney, Tokyo, London and New York. I got a coffee and flicked through
the spec for my next project. I smiled. It was for an Asian Exchange this time. High profile again. Plenty of development work.
    ‘Ahoy, ahoy,’ Boris popped his head over my cube.
    ‘So far so good.’
    ‘European market about to open. Nervous?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘ Hoooh ...! There it is. 8 a.m. Any
second now...’
    We both watched the screen for the European trading. For a moment
I forgot to breath, but then the prices trickled down in columns of orders and trades
and relief washed over me. I smiled at Boris and resumed reading the spec.
    ‘Hey, there we go. METX is on the map.’ He tapped the top of
my cube to say goodbye.
    As the morning went on people came over to check on my feed and
say well done. METX was an international metals exchange. It ran nearly twenty-four
hours a day and handled about a million trades a day. It was the kind of feed that
other department managers would check on its first morning, and upper management
would include in speeches. I felt a twinge of guilt. This success was going to be
used as proof the merge could work, but in reality I knew of other projects, more
complicated, that had now been cut down. Programmers were reluctant to do anything
with complicated analysis and the business analysts were only taking on simple development
feeds. Looking further at the AsiaCap requirements, I
realised the analysis side would be