Blood Jobs: Tech Support.

The worst job I've ever had? Tricky. Depends what you mean by worst really, doesn't it? I've had some shit jobs, some annoying jobs, boring jobs, jobs too complex and stressful for the money. I thought hard about it and well I have two answers. The first is the simple one. Never try and fix someone's computer over the phone if you want to stay sane. Customer tech support is one of the most demoralising and infuriating jobs in existence. Even the wages can't redeem it and they're often crap as well.

The second was the worst because it's the weirdest. I've never told another soul about this, I had to sign all sorts of documents which legally prevent me from speaking about it but I guess that doesn't really matter much now. I mean I killed my ex-boyfriend Gary and am in prison right? What else can they do to me now?

So, my company were contracted to maintain server banks in a Military research facility called Abdon Scarpe, about five miles north-west of Hawick. It was off the main road and fenced off a mile or so in a square. There was little but grass around the small facility which was basically five or six large portacabins stacked atop and next to each other in front of a hill which had a great semi-circular entrance covering a tunnel within. To the left of the entrance was a three storey building which looked like a cross between a hastily built office block and an air traffic control centre. The top floor had a glass tunnel that jutted deep into the hillside.

We were informed on our first day that that we were restricted to the portacabins. That was fine with me and Simon, the guy I worked with. The job was easy for the most part, though sometimes, the army boffins would get up to something that would suddenly have us dealing with several dozen critical temperature warnings at once. We weren't allowed to ask questions but we could certainly recommend solutions and we recommended that whatever they were doing would need to stop or the whole system could melt.

That was not possible, we were told. We needed to find a solution and quickly. It was Simon who came up with the solution. Their server system wasn't powerful enough so he could, we could, design them a new one specifically for their needs. They were pleased with this until he mentioned he'd need some idea of what they were up to for him to calculate specs for the upgrades.

After two weeks the system blew and alarms went off all over the place. We got locked in our portacabins for about three hours before someone manually came and let us out, it was a young soldier who was stressed but apologetic. The commander of the facility grilled us like we were cheese on bread. We kept telling him we had warned him this would happen. He angrily dismissed us and told us he never wanted to see our faces again.

On the Saturday of that week I received two calls, one from my company firing me and one from an individual who worked for a company contracted solely by the Ministry of Defence. A company with no name, only a series of letters and numbers. They wanted to hire Simon and I to do the work we said we could do, only with a whole lot of conditions, most of which were variants of keep your mouth shut or else.

We were hired directly as technical support officers assisting Military Research Department AS/G157. I have no idea what that meant. Occasionally, when we had to we worked alongside others, coders mainly. Everyone was tight lipped but other than that the place was surprisingly friendly. The Commander even had a bring your kid to work day, which I guess was because the place was in lock-down. They even had a big marquee in the grass and a large buffet lunch where people all mingled with other departments for the first time. It was there I met Gary and his daughter Emma.

He told me he was a vet, that his daughter was from his previous marriage which didn't work out because he finally came to terms with the reality that he was gay. Emma didn't seem to mind, she was only six, a little sweetheart. He and his ex still lived together for Emma's sake but since he worked here he had a flat in town. He told me he'd show me it, I said I'd like that.

We didn't start a relationship straight away but it wasn't long before we were spending more time in his little flat than either of our own homes. Allison, his ex was a lovely girl, I felt really sorry for her, she tried to be so understanding. Emma however called me Dink, because she had slight trouble pronouncing Derek and it wasn't long before the two of us were good friends. Allison would tell me that whenever she and Gary and Emma would go out Emma would always ask “Is Dink coming?”

God bless her.

Anyway we got the system up and running, it cost a pretty penny for all the right gear and then contracting someone to install the fibreoptic cable. Still the Commander was ecstatic when the final bill came in. He had assumed it to be an exponentially larger number. Simon and I joked that the next time it would be and keep most of it.

The servers, despite a few teething problems and one or two hiccups, worked fine. We rested on our laurels. After a while, on site support seemed tedious, we'd spend most of our time checking the servers were fine and then reading books. We were not allowed internet access. Gary was a big fan of Wodehouse and so I'd been ploughing my way through his work. I found it quite funny, it had a wit and charm I hadn't expected. Gary, less so. Over the couple of months we'd been in a relationship he'd become more serious, broody almost. I know some guys go for that troubled macho thing but not me, its a chore. I tried to talk to him a few times but after a while I just gave up. I stopped calling, he never called me, that was the end of it.

I rarely saw him after that. Once or twice I'd catch him in his white coat marching along that glass tunnel. I don't even think he was avoiding me, he was just one of those driven individuals, who thinks about the big picture so much he neglects all the small details.

One night we were asked by the Commander if we could keep an extra-special eye on the server banks. They were, apparently, going to try something that they'd never tried before and it might take up a lot of processing power. Simon and I were confident that it would be fine. I saw Gary walking a large dog on a leash out by the main entrance, he never made eye contact, was too busy petting the dog. It was a Doberman, a big spindly pup that was too playful for him, he kept yanking the dog's chain. It yelped and one of the soldiers started shouting at him. I went back inside.

At eleven o'clock the cpu monitors went crazy, they were taking up a lot of processing power after all but it was all well within range. Whatever they'd done was a success and the Commander even sent down a bottle of champagne for us with an order that we don't drink it while still on the clock.

I enjoyed the silly note more than the champagne, which I've always thought tasted like fizzy piss.

For about a week afterwards the same routine happened at eleven o'clock and the servers had no problem dealing with it. The Commander was quite chuffed at us, apparently everyone was. We felt good until he said that their program was currently running at about ten percent of it's capacity, could they increase it. Simon and I agreed it could take no more than about twenty percent. We told the commander that why he got it into his head to add our twenty to the ten that was running I'll never know.

I came in one night about six as usual and began to check the monitors. I was distracted because earlier in the day Allison, Gary's ex- wife, had called me asking if I had spoken to him or Emma of late. I told her I had not and she asked me that if I saw him, to get him to call her. I said I would.

I hadn't been with him for months, hadn't heard from either her or little Emma and it made me feel lonesome as I travelled to work. I thought of some way I could bump into Gary, perhaps rekindle an old flame.

I dismissed that by about nine o'clock when Simon came in with a delicious Prawn Masala. At Eleven the processors ramped up, Simon got concerned real fast as the monitor lines started to spike and turn red. He tried to quickly shut down some non essential services which helped somewhat, for a few seconds. Then the spikes went right up past critical and everything went black but only for a second. There were alarms going off everywhere. I scrambled to the door and walked out to see red lights flashing from the office building, from the entrance, from the glass tunnel. Something small and dark zipped past in that tunnel, the dog, it had got loose. A few seconds later there was flashes of light in the direction it had came from, from the tunnel, gunfire. Armed soldiers ran down the glass tunnel firing as they went, trying to kill the dog.

I found myself shocked, in a trance I walked towards the main building. I could hear distant shouting and more gunfire. A shape appeared at one of the second floor windows, came crashing through it, tumbled through space and crunched onto the ground hard with a sickening yelp.

I could see it, the dog, it had wires in it's skull, conductors, resistors, chips. It lay on the ground, it's ribs jutting through its flesh, it's legs spasming and jerking, its eyes staring right at me.

“Dink, Help me.” a little girl's voice struggled to say from a dying dog's mouth. “Dink, pleeeease.”

I closed my eyes as the soldiers shot her.