Time Flying Read Free

felt with my partner was partly due to his insistence on using a bluetooth headset while driving one of the ragtop jeeps he bought, modified and then crawled all over the Texas outback in, requiring the person he was talking to work hard to pull his voice out of the heavy background noise the headset picked up. Most of the annoyance on this day, however, was because of his insistence I be the one to spend several months (winter months, no less) in Ohio, setting up an installation of our software which represented the biggest single sale of our company ever. 
    The company, a Fortune 500 behemoth that produced hundreds of different products and services, in hiring LeftCoastX to build its in-house research and data-mining system, did three things. First, by moving from Windows to the Macintosh platform, a huge blow would be struck against Redmond, Washington's Microsoft. Second, by hiring us to build out the software running this part of the enterprise, they were making LeftCoastX a major player in the industry. 
    The third thing our getting this job did, while not part of the public knowledge base of the transaction, would be to confirm a long-time friendship between two graduates of an exclusive Chicago prep school, one of whom happened to be Gary Danner, my partner and half-owner of LeftCoastX. Yea, the old-boy network at its worst. Or, at its best, if you happen to be on the team of one of the old-boys. On the one hand, the fact that Gary and the Chairman of the Board of the client went to school together would make Gary the obvious choice to go to Cincinnati, but, as he argued, this was exactly why he couldn't be the partner who made the trip. My going would make the arrangement less about the relationship between him and the Chairman (or, to be more accurate, Chairwoman) should their history ever come to light. If it did come to light, certain assumptions would be made regarding the nature of their relationship in the past and today, assumptions quite correct, Gary made clear to me. LeftCoastX got the company's business for perfectly sound business reasons, but reality would be beside the point. It would just be best for everyone if I went to Cincinnati and Gary stayed as far away from there as possible. 
    That didn't stop me from trying to avoid a six month posting to Ohio, though, and as I slid out of the Jeep in front of a Chula Vista convenience store called, ironically enough, since the owners were two Chaldeans from Iraq, “Pancho’s,” I tried one last gambit to avoid the trip. "Dave would be so much better for this, Gary. He's what, 28, 29?" I said, pitching our top Development Lead, Dave Shuttman. "He's young, sharp, hungry for this. Hell, he'd..." 
    "And they'll hire him away in about a week," Gary interjected. "We can't afford that. It'd be a mess. You'd have to end up going there anyway, and have to replace him in San Diego." 
    “Right," I said, raising the white flag, as I walked into Pancho’s, silently waving at Terry, one of the Iraqi-born owners who, as usual, stood working behind the counter. I made my way to the back corner of the shop, to where the energy drinks were cooled and stored. 
    "Okay. I'm on it," I agreed. "I'll fly out right after the New Year," I said. 
    "Awesome," Gary replied. Strangely enough, he didn't just sound appreciative, he sounded...Relieved. Hmm, I thought, maybe there's more to this thing than I thought. But, I put those thoughts aside and made the decision to tell Molly that night I'd have to go to Cincinnati for no more than six months. I'd checked flight schedules, and found it wasn't the easiest trip to do non-stop on a regular basis. The best connections were Delta, and I hated flying Delta. 
    I paid for the Rock Star energy drink, talked to Terry for a few seconds about the economy, the war in Iraq, how his remaining family was making out there, and a couple minutes later was back in my Jeep, crossing the trolly tracks, driving down Anita Street to our South