The Cyclone Release

Bruce Overby

Description

It’s the late 90s Internet boom, and Brendon Meagher has just lost his wife Sadie in a freakish car accident at the edge of Silicon Valley. The Cyclone Release follows Brendon as he emerges from tragedy and lands in a pre-IPO start-up that promises astonishing riches. Mo Gramercy, a bright and commanding colleague with her own deep secret, joins Brendon, disrupts his malaise, and takes him as her lover. The characters’ careen toward IPO millions, their secrets suddenly converging, and both are shaken without mercy from bucolic notions of work, life, and impending fortune.

Sujets

• Psychological
• Literary
• Literature
• General officer
• Psychology
• General
• Fiction

Informations

• Publié par: Madville Publishing
• Date de parution: 15 novembre 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781956440096
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Copyright © 2022 by Bruce Overby
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
FIRST EDITION
The Cyclone Release is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, businesses, companies, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Requests for permission to reprint or reuse material from this work should be sent to:
Permissions
Madville Publishing
PO Box 358
Lake Dallas, TX 75065
Cover Design: Jacqueline Davis
Author Photo: Daniel Estrada
ISBN: 978-1-956440-08-9 paperback,
978-1-956440-09-6 ebook
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022937396
For Caroline
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Design
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Build
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Integrate
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Test and Fix
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Release
Chapter 15
Acknowledgments
About the Author
C HAPTER 1
Brendon Meagher sat alone in his spartan cubicle searching through the system. Finally, he found the list of hyperlinks that would show him what all the hype was about, and he clicked the last one. A window opened, displaying a splash page that hundreds of people had seen by then—the engineers who had built it, the capitalists who had funded it, the customers who had paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy it, and now Brendon.
This first look at it stopped him. Few outside the tech business would understand the beauty of a splash page like this, with just a few action buttons there, arranged in the shape of a wave:
Create. Submit. Review. Approve. Announce.
It was a dry business process transformed into something comfortable, each button glowing gently as you slid your mouse over.
What was he doing here? he thought. He was a technical writer, an interpreter of complex systems, but this thing looked to be as simple as an ATM. What could they possibly need a technical writer for?
The temperature in the cubicle was cold, then warm, then cold again. Brendon’s skin under his poly/cotton polo shirt had felt sticky all afternoon and had remained so in these early hours of the evening. Sweat would paint his forehead, then dissipate in the refrigerated air. While his fingers on the keyboard and right hand on the mouse were firm and calculated, he somehow felt the need to escape. It was the same feeling that had dominated that first six months after Sadie’s death: struggling first to escape the tragedy of it, escaping immediately from the stress of his job, then descending into a long malaise from which, again, he had needed to escape. These sensations of hot and cold, the sweat that dappled his forehead, they had persisted through all of it.
His backpack sat against the cubicle wall. It was his first day on the job at Janela Software, an all-star of the Internet boom, and that morning he had paused, rendered helpless, suddenly, over the backpack: What to put in it? A notebook and a pen to write with? Yeah. A couple of reference books? Sure. A picture of Sadie? No.
He heard laughter a few cubicles down, then voices, then the tapping of keys on keyboards. Young engineers, ten or twelve years younger than Brendon, who had built the system now glowing in front of him.
The system was called SmartEOL . Large manufacturing companies used it to discontinue complex products: to “bring them to an orderly end-of-life,” and remove them from the price list. It sounded simple, but it turned out to be incredibly complicated, as the young engineers had discovered when they started automating it. General Electric, for instance, couldn’t just pop up one day and say, We’re not selling this critical care ventilator anymore . They couldn’t do that because there would be thousands of those ventilators out there, in thousands of hospitals, and tens of thousands of neonatal, infant, and pediatric care nurses who had been trained to use them. These hospitals would have bought maintenance contracts and spare parts, and may have put in orders for more. To ensure babies didn’t die, GE had to give hospitals fair warning before they stopped selling and servicing a ventilator. They had to be told, well in advance, This is your last chance to buy this model…, This is your last chance to get support…, This is your last chance to get spare parts… , etc. And SmartEOL was built to automate all of that.
It was this underlying humanity that drew Brendon to his work. Complex systems like SmartEOL were designed and built for important, sometimes critical, purposes, but they weren’t any good if people couldn’t use them. This was the technical writer’s job.
As he often did at the start of a project, Brendon began to imagine the real people who would use SmartEOL. He imagined a product manager at Hewlett-Packard, a man he named Jake, in his fifties, perhaps, who had started his career when there were paper forms on everyone’s desks instead of computers, a man who would look at SmartEOL with disdain, another stupid computer thing forced on him by some unfeeling chief something officer. He imagined a financial analyst, Jane, a single mother with a sick kid at home and a butt-head for an ex, a cog in the wheel of a farm equipment manufacturer in Omaha who would use SmartEOL to generate reports, more spreadsheets to add to the dozens of spreadsheets she would examine and manipulate and condense each week. And he imagined an IT tech at a little parts manufacturer in Austin, a Mexican immigrant he named Rodrigo, who had bussed tables to work himself through a community college program and land his sweet job in an air-conditioned cubicle where he backed up databases, monitored the network, and set up the new SmartEOL user accounts for product managers like Jake.
Jake, Jane, and Rodrigo were his audience. What would they need to know?
Turning back to the screen, he looked again at the interface, and the wave:
Create. Submit. Review. Approve. Announce.
So simple and clean.
And then he saw the Help button in the upper right of the screen. This would be his world. He clicked, and a pop-up screen appeared. “Start Page,” it said at the top, and his mind immediately started working through the details engineers would never think about. Is start page the right term? Would it paint him into a corner later? Should it be screen instead of page ? A page is a web site. It just shows information. A screen is an application. It lets you enter data, interact, modify, manipulate.
And the rest of the text in the pop-up, careless verbiage slammed out by an engineer at two in the morning, made it clear why Janela needed a tech writer, after all. “When you want to EoL a product,” it said, “start on this screen.” So, in the title, it was a page , but in the body, it was a screen . And the acronym EoL was used as a verb. When you want to end of life … That term, end of life , struck Brendon suddenly, bringing on a feeling of emptiness that was familiar to him by now. He sat with it for a moment—no sense pushing on it, he had learned—then re-engaged with the screen.
To the engineers, using EoL as a verb was natural, like who cares , but to Brendon, it had the feeling of a very bad habit, a threat to the language. He immediately started thinking of what phrase he would use instead. He was formulating a style guide and a word list in his mind. Engineers wouldn’t even know what these things were, but that was the job of the technical writer. And just these few words in front of Brendon made it clear there was plenty for him to do.
It was a relief to feel satisfied at the prospect of useful work. There’d been none of it during those lost months after Sadie’s death, just cleaning up after a life, doing something with the clothes, the jewelry, the toiletries, a forest green and gold sun dress she’d worn in the wine country, along with the magical day it conjured, relegated to the donation bin.
But now he could dismiss all that and dive in. He reached down and flipped a lever on the chair, locking it into a comfortable position, and continued exploring, making notes, planning next steps. Hours passed, during which he barely noticed the farewells and footsteps of those leaving for the night. Seeing the digital clock on his screen roll to 11:00 p.m., he realized he was exhausted, shut down his system, and made his way to the exit, seeing with some relief that many of the cubicles were dark and empty.
Before he met Brendon, Gerhard Sinkel had spent weeks searching for a technical writer for the Janela Development team. Todd Lear, the user experience and utilities manager, had laid down the law at the start of the six-month release cycle: no way the engineers were creating manuals or online help. Engineers would spend hours at it, and the finished product would suck.
Gerhard had called some people and gotten some résumés, talked to some total losers, and was starting to lose hope. The acolytes at Janela referred to these losers as lepers: people who would sit in their enclosed offices and surf the web more than they actually worked, people who wouldn’t last a nanosecond in the tiny cubicles of a pressure cooker like Janela. Gerhard was never quite sure why they’d landed on the term leper , but he’d adopted it anyway, saying to Lear at one point, “Do technical writers come from the leper colony?”
On June 1 st , the day he interviewed Brendon, the parade of lepers Gerhard had met up to that point weighed heavy on his mind. His weekly Technical Team meeting had just broken up, and Gerhard sat scanning the cherry wood conference table that stretched out before him. He often sat like this for a few moments after a meeting, ostensibly reviewing his notes and filling in gaps from fresh memory, but really just stealing a few quiet moments to himself in one of the few large spaces at Janela where one could breathe. The rest of the space was chopped into eight-by