Chapter 16: Katie

Dan smiled. He was grateful to have someone with whom he felt the seeds of friendship germinating and taking root. He went back to work, and, a minute later, heard a gentle tapping on his door. He got up, opened it, and saw a young woman he assumed was Katie standing there looking up at him with a thin smile. She was a petite, lovely young woman of maybe 21 or 22 years of age with wavy chestnut-brown hair neatly flowing around her shoulders and wearing a tweed black and white business suit. Even with high heels, she was little more than five feet tall.

“Dean Amor?” She queried. “My name is Katie Ricci, and I was told to report to you.”

“Hi Katie,” Dan answered waving her in. “It’s very nice meeting you. Please call me Dan.”

“All right, Dan,” she said stepping into the office, her smile widening slightly.”

“I have not had the chance to meet you before as this is my first week and I’ve been pretty busy. Are you familiar with Lotus 1-2-3?” Dan asked, pointing at the five-inch green-tinted monochrome screen of the Compaq transportable on the small desk.

“I’ve worked with VisiCalc before but not Lotus, but I’m a fast learner” she said.

“There’s not that much difference between the two except for the formulas and function keys assigned to various functions. You’ll pick it up quickly, I’m sure. What I need you to do first is basically enter data into a spreadsheet I just finished creating today but barely began populating with data. I need to track faculty performance and competencies in order to facilitate report creation. I also created a separate spreadsheet to assign courses and faculty to the available rooms for every period. That is also not yet populated as the data entry is much more work than I had anticipated not having done this before.”

“What do you need me to do?”

“I just created a simple spreadsheet to track all the courses faculty have taught in the past three years and their relevant degrees. Later I’ll work on the courses that should be assigned to each instructor. But for now, it would be very helpful if you could go through the current and previous two years’ schedules and enter every course that has been previously assigned to each faculty member so that I can later print a report of classes each instructor has taught to assign them classes for the COS cohort that starts Monday. I have a binder here with the master schedules for the past five years. The spreadsheet has the instructors’ names down column A with the years 1985 on column B, 1986 on column C and 1987 on column D with a variety of additional data on columns E through M that you can ignore for now. I’ll input it later. I left five rows between each instructor as I did not see any instructor teaching more than five different courses in any one year after a very quick visual scan of the past schedules. If I missed something, rows can be added as needed. What I need you to do is to carefully cross check every schedule for the past three years and type in every course each instructor has taught in every program they teach in.” Dan then paused, catching himself, and looked at Katie closely. “I’m sorry, I know I’m giving you a lot of information. Does any of this make sense to you?”

“Yeah, I got it.” She replied, smiling. You need me to research all the different courses they taught for the past two years and for this year and note them on column B for every instructor every year. Easy peasey” she said. “I’ll get right on it.”

And with that, she opened the large loose-leaf binder, paged through the musty-smelling pages to the proper year, and began looking through the schedule and entering the courses as instructed. Dan was pleased, she did seem to be a quick study. But he decided to go back to his desk and start work on a different project before heading to lunch just in case she hit any snags or had questions along the way. Forty five minutes later, with no questions being raised, he asked Katie how it was going.

“It’s going fine, but the process is slow because of having to scan each page for instructors’ names and the classes they teach. Because there are so many different programs, it gets complicated. I’m working on Mr. Blackmun. They do teach an awful lot of classes. He actually taught six different classes, but I figured out how to add rows so that’s not a problem. And I’ll get faster as I go along,” she said, typing the entire time as she spoke.

“That’s terrific, Katie. Thank you. I’m not a touch typist and, though I’m pretty fast, I make a lot of mistakes as I type. You’re much faster than me and seem to make no mistakes at all from your continual typing. You’re a Godsent. Thank you.”

She turned to him beaming but simply said, “Just doing my job” in an exaggerated manner with a slight rolling of the eyes, then giggling softly, but without stopping her typing.

“I have a lunch date with Bob Wiener and am going to go now, if that’s OK. I’ll probably be gone for a little over an hour. Can I bring you something back?”

“No thanks,” she said. “I ate before coming.”

“How about a soda or coffee, or some dessert?”

“Nope. I’m good, but thanks for asking,” she said without turning away from her work or stopping her typing. Take your time. I’ll take messages if your phone rings. Otherwise, it will go to reception after the sixth ring, but some people hang up before that.”

“That would be great, thank you. I should buy an answering machine for times when you’re not here. Mr. Lantz has one as I left a message earlier today.”

“Reception has an answering machine for off hours calls or for when they’re too busy with multiple calls or away from the desk momentarily. They can also forward incoming calls directly to the answering machine if needed. I don’t think you need to worry about having your own machine, though. Taisha does a great job, and so do the work-study students assisting her.”

“Thanks, Katie. That’s good to know” Dan replied, walking towards the door, and adding “I’ll be back soon” as he opened the door and walked out.

He reached Bob’s office a minute later and knocked on the door frame of the open door. Bob quickly looked up from whatever he was reading.

“Ready to go?” Bob asked.

“Always,” Dan replied.

“That was fast,” Bob replied, grabbing his coat hanging on the back of his high-back office chair. It’s only ten of two.”

“Katie is a fast study. I could have come more than a half hour ago but wanted to hang around in case she had any questions. She had none despite not having worked with Lotus 1-2-3 before and has been more than twice as productive as I would have been typing in the material myself,” Dan said.

“Yeah, Katie is little dynamo,” Bob replied as the men walked to the elevator. “She’s one of the ones that slipped through the cracks. Cute as a button too.”

“What do you mean?” Dan asked as the men entered the empty elevator.

Bob chortled in response, then added “Well, once in a while a really good grain of wheat slips in unnoticed with all the chaff and we luck out. Kinda like you, I’m starting to think.”

Dan smiled at the compliment and said, “Not so sure about me, but she’s definitely a keeper. At least that’s my one-hour assessment of her.”

“Bank on it” Bob replied as the men walked out of the elevator and made their way to the as always busy street. It was a little chillier than the day before, but still lovely with plenty of sun despite some cloud cover.

“So where are we going today?” Dan asked.

“To my favorite diner, just a few blocks away. Good food and plenty of it, plus did I mention, beer and wine?” Bob chortled good naturedly.

As the men walked, Bob asked “So, how’s your second full day of work going?”

“Pretty well, actually,” Dan said. I think I have a way to replace one of the labs at no cost with PC clones and also found that I can get free student versions of the software packages I need bundled with textbooks at a reasonable cost of around $40 each.”

“Holy s**t,” Said Bob with genuine excitement. “Are you going to tackle world peace tomorrow?”

“Yeah,” said Dan laughing. “I have a plan. It involves one giant asteroid strike and poof, world peace achieved.”

“Not a very palatable plan, eh?”

“Well, you know what they say. The ends justify the means. You want world peace, I deliver. I never said it would be pleasant. Plus, this time it will hold.”

Bob chortled again with his signature mixture of part little boy’s unselfconscious amusement and part cynical old man’s cackle. “I hope the Melameds buy the idea. A no-cost option is the way to go with them. It's probably the only way to go.”

“We’ll see,” Dan said, adding “Marvin is supposed to talk with them today to see if they’ll agree. I have a meeting for Monday with a vendor that is willing to swap out the old Apples in one of our labs for brand new low-end PC clones. It’s a great deal, though I’d like to see the sample system he’ll bring on Monday for us to evaluate. If the damned thing works and comes as advertised, it will be a deal that’s pretty much impossible to beat.”

“Are those things hard to maintain or expensive to fix?” Bob asked.

“Not really. They’re much cheaper and easier to fix than any Apple computer, that’s for sure. And the open architecture means there are a lot of suppliers for replacement parts at really low prices in the rare instance something fails. In my limited experience, if they work out of the box and are still working in a couple of days, they are unlikely to fail for years. And if a part fails, replacements are cheap and easy to swap out from motherboards to peripherals, unlike Apple which forces you to run to them any time anything goes wrong and then charges you monopolistic prices for repairs and upgrades. It’s ironic that they market themselves to their rabid but still small user base as the liberal, play-nice company against the evil corporation. But they ARE the evil corporation. I love how they have liberals lining up to march in lockstep behind their fascistic company and rolling their eyes about the “corporate” IBM and the other PC players who produce a better product at a lower price and allow anyone to manufacture peripherals and parts for their systems. It is actually quite funny.”

“You mean like all the peace-loving students loudly protesting war and decrying violence while proudly wearing Che Guevara T-shirts?” Bob chortled once more, spittle flying from his mouth in the process.

As they reached the diner’s doors, Dan made no reply but smiled broadly at Bob’s comments. That summed it up. Like the Anti Shah of Iran demonstrators at Queens College when he attended classes there in perpetual demonstrations loudly decrying the Shah’s repressive, murderous regime only to impose another repressive regime after the Shah was overthrown. But Dan kept these thoughts to himself, preferring to keep politics out of work relationships, especially with new colleagues.

After a huge and hugely satisfying half-pound burger and crispy, not-previously-frozen fries and a beer, with a black coffee chaser, Bob insisted on paying for the meal after some protest from Dan, and Dan left a generous tip. Both men agreed that in the future, to avoid arguments, they’d split the bill absent special occasions. They then proceeded to walk back to the office chatting about work and life and getting to know one another better.