Frank and Catherine are parents worn down by three young children, and life. As they try to come up with a new, more efficient, way of managing their lives, they are met with a series of unforeseen obstacles. When Frank gets home from work, things don't seem quite right. He begins to wonder if some of the problems experienced by his family are in fact the work of malicious people from his past.
Excerpt:
“Only 3 o’clock?” thought Frank. He had an hour and a half to go before he would be free again. Free from the constant web requests for sites that needed content changed right away, and free from calls coming in from the site wardens ten minutes later to see if all the changes were made. Free from waiting for subject matter experts to approve those changes, and certainly free from running into issues uploading the modifications to the staging server. Frank could not wait to be free from the game it really was… the rush-to-wait game. Though it was expected of him to complete web requests in a speedy fashion, it would still take a day or two before the changes were approved.
All jobs were stressful in their own right, but for Frank, most of his stress as a senior web developer stemmed from the fact that he could never dedicate his efforts to one task, or any one project. He was constantly being pulled in all directions. Though he was six foot tall and on the chubby side of 240 pounds, Frank felt thin and worn out by the end of the day, sort of like a lump of dough that had been smooshed, pressed and rolled out until the surface beneath showed through.
Frank was hunched over his desk listening to a woman drone on about changes that were needed for her division’s website — a project he had not planned to work on that day.
“Is it possible to change the color scheme for the top section alone?” she asked.
“Yes,” answered Frank in an automated fashion. His hazel eyes were glazed over with fatigue, as he stared through pictures of his family hanging from the cubicle wall. Annoyed, he ran his fingers back and forth through loose swirls of ink-black hair, hoping this would keep him alert while the woman kept talking.
“You see the third paragraph on the home page?"
She paused but not long enough for Frank to respond.
“I’d have to check my e-mail,” mumbled Frank.
“Well either way, it’s a simple cut and paste job, right?”
“Yes,” lied Frank.
Nothing was ever that simple, but the site wardens (formally called Division Point of Contacts) always thought it was. Who could blame them? They approached change from a visual perspective. None of them knew HTML, JavaScript, PHP, or any of the coding languages that made their sites functional, so how could they know that it wasn’t just a matter of “cut and paste”?
“And lastly…” continued the woman.
Frank wondered if normal people used the word “lastly” in a real conversation. He couldn’t remember anyone using that word apart from this woman on the phone. What would a person who feels it’s important to say “lastly” even look like? Though everyone knew each other’s names on the job (thanks to e-mails and global address lists), most employees had never met anyone outside their everyday cubicle crew. This woman, in particular, Frank had never spoken to, until now. She didn’t sound like she was a fun person, so he envisioned her hair tied back in a bun with very little make up to brighten her face. Maybe she wore black pants and a white blouse, something strict, to match her tone on the phone; it was either black or it was white, this way or that way, no in between. “In between,” thought Frank, would a woman like her let anyone in between?
