Featured image by DarkmoonArt_de from Pixabay
Morning came hard and late for Gina. The clock in the bedroom said it was after 10. Somewhere in this palace Bobby called home she could hear the rug rats reigning down terror. She stumbled out of bed, dressed and headed to the kitchen for some caffeine.
“Morning sister!” came a far too chipper Janet. “Need some hair of the dog?” laughing out the question.
“Just some of that iced tea you were drinking last night” answered Gina. People who didn’t drink can be so fucking annoying in the morning thought Gina.
“How do you like your eggs?” responded Janet.
“She likes them over hard or scrambled” mom called out from another room.
“I still have to go by home and change” blurted Janet.
“You own the company sister. Show up when you show up. If someone really needs you they will call. It’s Friday in California and perfect surfing weather. Your office is probably empty anyway.”
There was truth to that part. On Fridays almost all of her employees who had the option to work from home did. Kind of sucked for the receptionist and a few other support staff whose job was location specific. One really can’t phone in a greeter job. Gina went to her car and fetched her company laptop. Once back in the kitchen she sent an email stating she wouldn’t be in until after 1pm and wouldn’t be checking email again until then. If anything couldn’t wait give her a call. She popped open a Web browser after thanking Janet for breakfast and searched for a used computer store near her current location.
“I don’t mean to spy sister” Janet said while refilling her iced tea, “but a used computer store? Seriously? You?”
“Basically a throw away. Something small, easily portable, obviously off-lease. Perfect model has a docking station so I can just click in and click out. When clicked in I have one or two extra monitors with full sized keyboard and mouse. Need one the company doesn’t own for emails and Web research. There we go! This place!” There was a bit of clicking and muttering before she pulled a steno pad out of her laptop bag and began writing things down.
Mom walked by and said “You could just send that address to your phone.”
Gina reached into a front pouch of her laptop case and pulled out her stick phone stating “No, not really. Even if I could send it there I wouldn’t want to.”
“And people say I’m old” replied her mom.
“I bought this phone six months ago” Gina said without looking up. “It will survive a 15 foot fall onto concrete and last over 30 minutes under 20 feet of water. The higher end model has a webbing anchor so it can be clipped to a wet suit. It also survives deeper and longer under water. Surfers and divers buy them. If there were more surfers and divers Apple would be an also-ran in the phone business. This model is mostly for construction workers. Iron workers I think. Has some kind of noise dampener which allows you to have a conversation while standing next to a jack hammer. It won’t pick up the noise so it doesn’t shred the speaker in the ear piece right after shredding your eardrum.”
“Iron workers have a need for a phone which works under water?” queried Janet.
“I suppose it gives them time to fish it out. Idiot phones barely survive a splash let alone being dropped from a significant height into a lagoon at a construction site” replied Janet.
“I cracked my screen dropping mine onto the carpeted floor of my bedroom” muttered mom. “Seriously though? Surfers can’t give up texting when they are out on the water?”
“From what I’ve heard they phone in shark sightings while asking for a boat to bail their asses out” answered Gina. “Some even report drug shipments or at least the transfers between boats.”
“Wow! Never thought of that!” exclaimed Janet. “With all of the boats out there fishing some could easily be fishing packages of drugs out of the ocean along with their catch. They would have never left sight of the coast so no probable cause for search.”
“Why do divers need a cell phone?” spat mom. “It’s not like you can talk under water?”
“Depends on your rig” answered Janet. “Some of those full helmet scuba masks have bluetooth in them so the spouse can tell you to pick up milk on the way home” she smirked.
“Or when you find yourself tangled in weeds, trapped in the wrecked ship you were exploring or in some other predicament you can actually call for help” continued Gina. “I suppose Navy Seals like them for inland water operations because their communications can just hide in all of the other phone calls and text messages going on around them.”
“Who would have thought . . .” mom trailed off.
“Apparently the people who built these phones and that tiny segment of the population which aren’t genetic idiots who put their personal lives on the most insecure device ever created” spat Gina. She didn’t mean to, but this conversation was abusing her hang over.
“My my my. Drink a whole bottle of wine by yourself and you’re just a peach in the morning” sang Janet with an evil smirk.
“If someone hadn’t made me eat breakfast I would be a peach in my car with nobody the wiser” answered Gina. Janet burst out laughing and even mom chuckled. “So that’s what causes road rage!” Janet chortled.
She did her thank yous and hugs then left to pick up the “new” computer equipment on her way home. The person running the place was a bit shocked someone bought one laptop, two docking stations, four monitors with cables, two keyboards and two mice all in one order. The off-lease resellers got stuff in bulk then had to watch it trickle out over months. People generally only bought one item. Before showering she carted one setup into her home and got it all connected on her desk. After getting cleaned up, changed and driving in, she found one of the tech support staff to cart the other setup to her office and get everything working. He was a bit shocked at seeing the second hand equipment but didn’t put up much of an argument.
Once the new laptop was on the network she parked her company laptop on the far corner of her desk and went into full-on Gina mode. Both her and Bobby shared this trait. When they had a problem to solve the bit was set in their teeth, nothing could pull it out. No detail was too small for them to investigate. If her sister in-law wants to get cocky bragging about how she can protect the family, then so be it. She dearly loved her brother, but the gauntlet had been tossed. Adding insult to injury, Gina was just plain ass bored. Sitting in an office like an MBA or Wall Street CEO was for people capable of nothing. Gina was more than capable and launching these two companies was a means to an end.
She took a burner phone from a locked desk drawer and called one of the geeks who ran some of her other Web sites. While she had him on the phone he set up a shiny new email account at one of those domains. Once she got her email client working with it he emailed her a list of 15 other accounts he created for her using a dozen different domains. The email told her to print it out and delete it if she was worried about the current account being compromised. She plugged the phone into her computer to charge.
Before Gina knew it, the clock said 4:30. She had been surfing the Web making mental plans after finding a map of U.S. fiber backbone resources. Spent quite a bit of time clicking and comparing. It seemed like quite a few companies had fiber backbone running from Chicago to St. Louis Missouri to Dallas Texas and almost straight across through Phoenix, AZ into the southern tip of California. Quite a few had backbones running from Chicago to Indianapolis then straight east. The Chicago to St. Louis, MO portions all seemed to more or less follow Interstate 57 south. One company also had a backbone which went clear over to the western edge of Illinois from Chicago then to Dallas.
“So” Gina muttered. “Need to find a location somewhere along Interstate 57 far enough away from Chicago to avoid all of its hassles and taxes. Phoenix could be nice too. Wouldn’t have to deal with snow, just having the sun melt the car dash. Odd we don’t have that problem out here. Then again, we don’t have many days north of 100 degrees, they do. Easy-Bake oven for the dash.”
The real time eater had been clicking various search links for abandoned factories. Then she looked for shopping malls and warehouses and finally just bare farmland. That dream of owning two square miles to build the perfect data center went up in smoke. “I gotta stop pulling numbers out of my ass when talking dollars” Gina said out loud. “Finding the people and leasing some office space as well as server hosts to start a company can easily be done for around three million but there is nothing that large for sale along a major fiber backbone.”
She then fished a thumb drive out of her bag and stuck it in the laptop. A few clicks later she was into the hidden directory looking through an encrypted file containing her very special contacts. Another encrypted file had a list of brokerage accounts. Not the complete list, just the ones her REIT could access in a pinch. Her next task was to call Mo. “Can you talk” she asked when Mo answered. “Let me call this number back in five minutes” Mo responded before hanging up.
Gina really liked Mo. In a world of #MeToo, feminism and every other movement that one way or another shit on the classic woman, Mo reveled in being a tough old broad. She was even proud to call herself that. In some ways she was a role model for Gina. If some guy had ever tried to coerce Mo into having sex she didn’t want Mo would gladly go to prison for killing him. She was the stereotypical heavily armed blue collar Christian woman who wasn’t that heavy on the Christianity. Killing someone for bad behaviour wasn’t forbidden by the list of commandments Mo followed. Always good for a laugh and even better for advice. Gina passed the time composing an email to Mo from her new email account, pasting in the links which were the fruit of this afternoon’s labor. She was just about done when the phone rang.
“Hello.”
“Sorry about that but needed to get to my home office so we could talk” replied Mo. “What’s up?”
“Have you got a pen?”
“Yep! That’s the other reason I came here. Hard to find them anywhere else. Damn things keep walking off.”
“Write down this list of accounts.”
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