Tuesday started with fourteen tickets in the queue.
The IT corner at eight-fifty had the morning quiet. The yucca on the partition was now down to four leaves the wrong color of green, somebody had refilled the coffee pot at the unmaintained station without rinsing it, the AC was running cold over the bullpen because nobody had touched the thermostat since Monday. Sandra's mug was on my desk again. *Outlook again.* Three of the fourteen were from the logistics floor, the same situation as every other logistics ticket for weeks, the same admin-level configuration problem that I couldn't fix and the admin who'd made it wouldn't acknowledge. I had the routing request open in a second window. Twenty-two business days since I'd filed it. Standard response was three to five.
I closed the symptom tickets and added a note to the routing request, the fourth such note in the last two weeks. The request had more documentation on it than some of the resolved tickets in the queue. The request was still open. The logistics floor was still losing their credentials twice a week. My notes were beautifully written and doing nothing.
Marcus appeared at the coffee station at ten.
"Queue?" he said.
"Fourteen."
"That bad or normal?"
"Normal." I poured my coffee. "LDAP routing is still not moving."
He made a sound. Marcus wasn't in IT, but he'd heard me complain about the LDAP issue enough times to have a working model of it.
"How long now?"
"Twenty-two business days."
"And the standard is three to five."
"Three to five."
He poured his coffee.
"You've already escalated it?"
"Twice. With root cause summaries. The routing ticket has more documentation on it than some of the resolved tickets in the queue."
"Whose job is it?"
"The admin who made the undocumented config change eight weeks ago," I said. "That admin hasn't responded to the routing request, the follow-up, or the root cause summary. They're technically doing me a favor. If they responded they'd have to acknowledge the undocumented change."
Marcus drank his coffee. "That's a specific situation."
"It's IT support. You see the problem. You document it. Then you wait for the person whose job it is to do their job."
He nodded and went back to finance.
The printer formed an opinion at eleven-forty.
Amber light. PAPER JAM: REMOVE JAM AND RELOAD PAPER. Eleventh time since September. The rear-feed tension roller had drifted again. Replacement part on order since February. Parts request in the queue since February. Same relationship with resolution as the LDAP routing queue.
I went over and did the thing I could do in my sleep by now, the panel and the roller and the thumb and Resume, and it surrendered the same nine pages it always surrendered.
I added a note to the parts request: *Week three of August. Recurring misalignment, 3-5 business day interval as previously estimated, currently trending shorter. Manual correction applied. Part still pending.*
The printer would jam again. This wasn't a mystery. It was a scheduled appointment.
I was in the middle of a ticket about a Bluetooth pairing issue on one of the logistics desktops when my phone buzzed.
The message was from Amber. One line.
*Forgot a thing. Can you check the cabinet above the microwave when you get home.*
I looked at it.
She'd put something in a cabinet in my kitchen without telling me. I didn't know when.
I put the phone face-down and went back to the Bluetooth ticket.
That worked for about four minutes.
"You're doing the thing," Marcus said.
Eleven minutes after the text. I'd closed the Bluetooth ticket and was working on the second logistics ticket when he appeared in the doorway with his afternoon coffee. No reason for him to be in the IT area in the afternoon.
"What thing," I said.
He gestured at my desk. "The thing where you do the work very carefully and also something's in the background."
"I'm working."
"You close a ticket, look at your phone, close another ticket." He leaned in the doorway. "Is it the trainer?"
"There was a text," I said.
"Bad text?"
"Logistical text."
He waited.
"She left something at my apartment," I said. "She wanted me to check."
Marcus looked at me. "She has a key."
"She knows where the spare is."
He thought about that. "So she's been there when you're not there."
The spare key was on the hook by the door. I hadn't discussed the spare key with her. It had been on that hook for eight months. Household backup, not a standing invitation. I was revising that in real time.
"Apparently," I said.
Marcus looked at the ceiling.
"You seem okay with this," he said.
"I'm okay with it," I said.
He nodded slowly. "Okay." He went back to finance.
I saved the thought for later and went back to the queue.
The afternoon had seven more tickets. Four new, three logistics symptoms. I closed the new ones, updated the symptoms, added a fourth escalation note. By four-thirty the queue was at pending. Not resolved, but the correct end state for a Tuesday.
I got on the Metro at five-twelve.
The cabinet above the microwave had a box of jasmine tea in it. A note in her flat handwriting: *Better than what you have.*
She was at my apartment when I got home. One of my t-shirts, the gray one with the small bleach mark at the hem, and nothing else. The shirt was long enough to cover almost nothing useful and was doing the job loosely, the platinum hair down across her shoulders and across the gray cotton. She had me against the kitchen counter before I'd put my bag down. Her hand in my jeans, her fist closing around my cock, stroking me slow and steady while her mouth went to my neck and her other hand pushed under my shirt to flatten on my chest. "I've been waiting since two," she said against my skin. She pulled me to the bedroom by my belt. She pushed me down on the bed and climbed on top of me with the shirt still on, lifted it just enough to free her tits, and put me inside her in one slow motion. She rode me with her hands flat on my chest, her tits bouncing under the loose gray cotton, her pussy wet and tight and hot, the t-shirt riding up around her hips with every drop. She came twice before I came. The jasmine tea waited until morning.
Wednesday I closed the queue by noon and added note number five to the LDAP routing request.
The logistics floor hit the drift window at eleven-fifteen, right on schedule. Four new symptom tickets. Same root-cause note. Pending.
At two-forty the printer jammed again. I fixed it on muscle memory. Forty-seven hours since the last one, down from fifty-five.
Twenty-two business days on the routing request. The documentation was excellent. The problem was unchanged.
I drank the jasmine tea.
It was better than what I had.