Avogadro Corp

by William Hertling

  John Anderson let his heavy messenger bag slide to the floor and shrugged out of his wet raincoat before hanging it on a wall hook behind his desk. He dropped into his chair, the pneumatic shock absorber taking his weight without complaint, and sighed at the prospect of another day in Procurement processing purchase requests. A tentative peek at his inbox revealed more than a hundred new emails. His shoulders slumped a little and he reached for his coffee.

  This week he had the kids, so he had to drop them off at school before work. Since Portland’s crazy school system meant the best public schools were all elective, he and his ex-wife had to choose among a dozen different schools. They ended up with the Environmental School. His kids loved the place, and so did he. Unfortunately, they lived in Northeast Portland, the school was in Southeast, and work was across the river in Northwest. His normal twenty-minute commute turned into an hour-plus on the days he dropped the kids off, which meant he’d arrive late at work, his smartphone beeping and buzzing as emails piled up. He loathed starting the day with a backlog. The consolation prize was that the kids’ school was right next to a Stumptown Coffee. John sipped at the roasted Ethiopian brew, the dark, bittersweet warmth bringing a smile to his face.

  As the coffee brought his brain into gear, he found the will to tackle his inbox. He was brought up short by a puzzling email from Gary Mitchell. Sent earlier this morning, the email asked him to divert five thousand servers. John read the email three times in its brief entirety.

  From: Gary Mitchell

  To: John Anderson

  Subject: ELOPe Project

  Time: 6:22am

  Body:

  Hi John,

  Sean Leonov asked me to help out the ELOPe guys. They need additional servers ASAP, and we’re running out of extra capacity here. Please accelerate 5,000 standard servers out of the normal procurement cycle, and give them to IT for immediate deployment. Assign asset ownership to David Ryan.

  Thanks, Gary Mitchell

  Normally when a department wanted new servers, they put in a purchase request. Parts were bought, shipped to Avogadro data centers, assembled into the custom servers Avogadro used, and installed onto racks. Then another group took over and installed the operating system and applications used on the servers. Depending on the size and timing of the order, it would take anywhere from six to twelve weeks from the time they were requested until the servers were available for use.

  When a department needed servers in a rush, they requested an exception. That process would take servers already purchased for another group and in the pipeline, and divert the servers to the department that needed them urgently. Replacement computers would be ordered for the first group, who would have to wait a little longer.

  Diversion requests weren’t uncommon; no, the puzzling part wasn’t the request, but that Gary would send an email. Only the procurement app could be used to order, expedite, or divert servers, a fact Gary should know since he routinely requested more servers.

  He put his hand on the phone and then took it away. A call to Gary would eat up at least fifteen minutes. Regardless of what the procurement rules were, whenever John tried to explain them to anyone, they would argue with him. The higher up in the company they were, the more they would argue, as though their lofty organizational height carried potential energy that could override the rules. A quick email would save John from getting his ear chewed out.

  From: John Anderson

  To: Gary Mitchell

  Subject: Email Procurement Forms

  Gary,

  We can’t do a server reallocation exception based on an email. I couldn’t do that for 5 servers, let alone 5,000 servers. Please use the online Procurement tool to submit your request: http://procurement.internal.avogadrocorp.com, or have your admin do it for you. That’s the only process for procurement exceptions we can use. We can approve your reallocation exception if you follow the existing process and provide appropriate justification.

  Thanks,

  John Anderson

  John continued to work through his backlog of emails. The number of new messages in his inbox would give the casual observer the impression he had been gone from work for a week, rather than just the late start he had gotten dropping off his kids. He took another sip of coffee and continued to work through the pile. The rest of his day, like every other, would consist of endless rounds of coffee and emails. Gary’s message might have been a little unusual, but it was quickly forgotten amid the deluge of other issues.

  A few hours later, on the other side of the campus from John Anderson, Pete Wong brought his lunch from the cafeteria in Building Six diagonally across to Building Three, pausing briefly on the windowed sky bridge. The sun had come out, and he raised his face to feel its heat for a few moments. Below, the sunlight glistened on wet streets, one of his favorite aspects of Portland’s climate. As a kid he would run outside on rainy days when the sun broke through the clouds, pretending fairies had covered the street with magic dust.

  A crowd of laughing people, marketing folk from their attire, entered the skybridge, distracting him from his memories. He continued through and then went down four flights of stairs, out of the daylight and into the fluorescent gloom of basement offices.

  At one department meeting after another, Pete had been assured his Internal Tools team, responsible for delivering business applications used inside the company, would be relocated just as soon as aboveground space became available. It never happened.

  It was no surprise that the company had stuck the Internal Tools team in what amounted to the dungeons. Everyone at Avogadro used his team’s tools to get their daily jobs done, from ordering office supplies to getting more disk space to filling out their timecards. But because Pete’s team didn’t develop the sexy, customer-facing products, they were the absolute runts in the corporate hierarchy. No executives or research and development engineers would ever be sentenced to the basement offices. The injustice made him gnash his teeth sometimes.

  Back at his desk, Pete took solace in his lunch. His office space sucked and his team was unappreciated, but the food was good. Fresh gnocchi in a butter sauce and mixed salad greens. A cup of gelato stayed cold in a special vacuum insulated cup while he ate. The food was all organic and locally sourced, of course; the coffee wasn’t bad either, though it came from Kobos. Pete preferred Ristretto, but only a few of Portland’s roasters were big enough to supply Avogadro’s headquarters. Pete’s wife, a tea drinker, couldn’t understand the Portland obsession with coffee.

  He ate with one hand as he looked over his inbox. A new message caught his eye.

  From: John Anderson

  To: Pete Wong

  Subject: Email Procurement Forms

  Hi Pete,

  This is John Anderson. I work over in Procurement. Even though we’ve got a procurement web application from IT Tools, we still get hundreds of email requests we can’t handle. Part of the problem stems from sales people in the field who can send emails from their smartphone, but have a hard time getting a secure VPN connection to the internal websites. Can you create an email-to-web bridge to allow people to get the form by emailing us, so they can then fill out the form and reply to submit the requisition? I mentioned this idea to Sean Leonov, and he said you guys could whip up something like this in a day or two.

  Thanks,

  John

  Pete stared at the strangeness of this. John Anderson, some guy in Procurement, buddies with Sean Leonov, cofounder of Avogadro? Sean was a living legend. Pete hadn’t met anyone who knew him directly.

  Pete pondered the email. Why did Sean think Internal Tools could implement this in a day? Was he even aware of the IT department? How had Sean, or even John, decided to single him out? It all seemed so unlikely.

  The request was a ten on the bizarre meter, but had a certain kind of plausibility. He imagined a salesperson working in the field, using their smartphone to access internal sites. Small screen, low bandwidth. The justification made sense, and if doin
g this impressed Sean Leonov, well, that couldn’t hurt his career. This could be his ticket to one of the real R&D project teams, instead of being stuck in the dead-end Internal Tools department.

  He spent a few minutes imagining his future workspace, daydreaming of an office with sunlight pouring in immense windows. Maybe he’d overlook the West Hills or, even better, the river.

  With a start, he sat up straight. He would spend some time looking into the request. His fingers found the keyboard and starting searching. His excitement grew when his first search for “email to web service” turned up an existing design posted by some IBM guys. After reading through the article, he realized he really could implement the email bridge in a couple of hours.

  His other work forgotten, Pete started in on the project. He created a new Ruby on Rails web application to do the necessary conversion of web pages to emails, and emails into web page form submissions. It was easier than expected, and by mid-afternoon he had a simple prototype running on the department servers.

  He discovered a few bugs in the software. Puzzling over the details in his head, he rushed down the hall to the coffee station for a refill.

  Mike left his office, nodded to a few teammates on the way, and headed downstairs for the nearest exterior door. After banging his head against the same problem for hours and becoming increasingly frustrated, he needed to clear his mind. The performance issues had become an insurmountable obstacle.

  Once outside, Mike wandered around Avogadro’s South Plaza, an open amphitheater and park. Just one of the many corporate perks employed to keep everyone happy. Blissfully clear skies contrasted with still-wet pavement from nighttime rains. He waved to a flock of engineers jogging by.

  What he found this morning was far more puzzling than the issues he’d expected to run into.

  There were two distinct parts of ELOPe. Users saw the front-end process evaluating emails in real-time and offering suggested improvements. But the piece that troubled Mike today was the other half, the back-end process for analyzing historical emails and generating affinity clusters.

  While the effectiveness of ELOPe’s emails was compelling, the efficiency with which the code ran stunk by anyone’s measure. But in the past, the efficiency was at least predictably bad. In the course of attempting to improve resource utilization over the past months, Mike learned that each new email fed into the system required roughly the same number of processor cycles to process.

  This morning, though, nothing behaved as expected. According to the application logs, nobody used ELOPe last night, and yet the load metrics had been pegged for hours—a sure indication of a ton of computer processing time being spent on something. But what? In closed prototype mode, only the members of the development team had access to ELOPe. That meant software coders, interaction designers, and the linguistics experts particular to their project. Everyone’s activities were logged, but the records didn’t reveal any activity. Yet someone or something was generating server load.

  Mike hoped fresh air and a walk around the plaza would help him figure out the problem. The last thing he wanted was additional performance problems when they were looking for a massive improvement. He sat on the amphitheater steps and rested his head on his hands. He watched another set of joggers go by. For someone who prided himself on taking things easy, the world weighed heavy on his shoulders right now.

  Chapter 4

  Pete Wong had cut and pasted code he’d downloaded from a dozen different websites, creating a real kludge he wouldn’t want to show off in a coding style contest. He ran the test suite one final time and smiled as it passed the last finicky test. He’d implemented the email to web bridge in less than twenty-four hours! It worked, by golly! He tested the new service against the Internal Tools web service, Procurement application, and a handful of other sites. It worked for everything.

  He drummed his thumbs on the desk in excitement. Using off-the-shelf libraries written for Ruby on Rails, he’d glued together the necessary pieces quickly. What once took weeks in old web development environments required mere hours in a modern, nearly magical language like Ruby. Using such powerful tools, startups built products in a weekend and launched on shoestring budgets. He wondered for the hundredth time if he shouldn’t leave Avogadro to start his own company.

  Pete pulled his keyboard closer and started an email to John Anderson, the guy in Procurement. In a bold move, he cc’ed Sean Leonov. No harm in a little visibility, right?

  Pete explained the implementation and wrote detailed instructions on how to use the email bridge, a little more than five screenfuls of email. Whoops. Perhaps the process was more complicated than the folks in sales could cope with. Pete didn’t know anyone in sales, but he suspected they might not have in-depth technical skills. Well, at least what he provided was complete, even if rough around the edges.

  He clicked send and sat back in his chair, sipping his coffee and basking in the glow of his accomplishment. He had good coding kung fu.

  Pete pondered bragging about his achievement to his coworkers. A dark thought occurred: perhaps there was something a little irregular about what he’d done.

  He sat forward and let his cup thump onto his desk. He’d never told the rest of the team about the project. This request should have come through the normal process like everything else; not only that, but the code should have been peer-reviewed by his fellow developers before he deployed. He’d been so concerned with impressing Sean Leonov that he didn’t stop to consider the usual process. Well, no one could blame him for taking initiative.

  Despite this, some bigger issue nagged at him. What–

  He jumped out of his seat and pounded the wall with a fist as realization hit him. He’d just implemented an off-the-radar system that interfaced with a dozen different business-critical web services inside the company, probably violating all sorts of security policies. On reflection, he definitely had. His cramped office grew suddenly stifling.

  Just as quickly as he had become alarmed, he relaxed a little and sat back down. If Sean Leonov thought the Internal Tools team could implement the request within twenty-four hours, he clearly meant they should pull out all the stops. Pete couldn’t go back and yank the application off the servers, not after telling John and Sean the service was available. He shook his head: he was worried about nothing. The bridge was invulnerable. His tool relied on email credentials to validate user logons, and if any product in the company was secure, it was AvoMail.

  If he told his boss and the rest of his team now, he’d get his wrist slapped. The best course of action would be to keep quiet until he had gotten a response from Sean. Once he showed that to the team, any skipping of due process would be forgiven. With his plan in place, one in which he wouldn’t take too much heat, he relaxed a little more.

  A ruckus came from down the hall, rapidly getting closer. Had they already found out what he’d done? He grew alarmed until a group of his coworkers ran past his open door. A few seconds later, Internal Tools’ technical lead stuck his balding head in Pete’s doorway and said, “We got a hot tip the billiard room showed up on the fourth floor of Building Two. Coming?”

  Relieved, Pete smiled and leaped up from his desk. He’d never seen the mysterious Avogadro billiard room that roved from building to building. “Absolutely!” he called, as he ran from his office, following the gang of geeks.

  Work forgotten, Pete joined the boisterous hunt for the billiard room. Laughter rang out as other groups heard the rumor and entered the chase. The room would only accept the keycards of the first sixty-four people to find its new location, adding to the urgency of the search. As teams ran through the halls, they told each other outright lies about the suspected whereabouts, all part of the game surrounding the mystery.

  While people played and laughed, thousands of computers hummed and exchanged data. A few servers allocated to Internal Tools spiked in usage, but nobody was around to notice.

  Gene Keyes walked back to his office with another cup o
f coffee, grateful the campus had returned to a somewhat normal decorum after the insanity of the hunt for the billiard room. On some level, he was curious about the mystery of the moving room, but he hated the way the kids around him turned the puzzle into a superficial game, as they did with everything.

  He searched the pockets of his suit for a note. His rumpled jacket and graying, disheveled hair were in stark contrast to the young, hip employees dressed in the latest designer jeans or fashionable retro-sixties clothing. Nor did he fit in with the young, geeky employees in their plaid shirts or tees with obscure logos. Not to mention the young, smartly-dressed marketing people in their tailored business casual wear. Fitting in and impressing others weren’t high on his list of priorities.

  As he approached his own office from the coffee station, he found a blonde girl knocking on his door. “Can I help you?” he asked, halting the search for the missing note.

  “I’m looking for Gene Keyes,” she said in a bubbly voice. “I’m Maggie Reynolds, and I—”

  “I’m Gene,” he said, cutting her off. “Come in.” He opened the door and walked in. She could follow him or not.

  “Uh, my boss sent me because he’s missing four...” She trailed off.

  Gene put his cup down and took a seat. He glanced up to an astonished expression on her face.

  “Wow, I didn’t know anyone still used...Wow, this is a lot of paper.”

  Gene turned around, despite himself. Yes, it was true his office was piled with computer-generated reports. Stacks of good, old fashioned letter-sized paper littered every flat surface. Oversized plotter printouts with huge spreadsheets and charts hung from the walls. The centerpiece of the office, the desk he occupied, was a 1950s-era wooden piece that nearly spanned the width of the room. It might have been the only furnishing in the entire building complex manufactured in the previous century. Incongruously, the desk was far larger in every dimension than the door. The people with a good brain on their heads, often engineers, but occasionally a smart manager, those who trusted their guts, instincts, and eyes, but took little for granted, they’d come in and their eyes would bounce back and forth between the desk and the door trying to puzzle out the mystery. Sadly, she didn’t appear to notice.