Outsource@Home—Pt. 01

We managed to recover; after moving to the back seat, he successfully reciprocated my oral ministrations. We made slow love twice more that night, and talked and talked and talked some more. Jeff finally took me home around 4 in the morning. We realized that we weren't in love and there was little chance we ever would be, but friends? You bet!

After several one-last-kisses I went inside, wishing Sandy had given me a dozen Trojans.

============

Part 2

A phone call changes Kat's life

ALL THINGS CONSIDERED, I couldn't have asked for a better way to lose my virginity, but I sure could have used a less loquacious lover. Being a considerate fellow, Jeff didn't brag to his mates about finally porking the Ice Queen, but he couldn't resist taunting his dickhead older brother. The first time I visited him in the hospital, he told me how he got in John's face at the Dew Drop Inn a week after the prom.

"I got that blow job from Kat Romano you wanted, John, and then some. Three and-then-somes, in fact. I guess nice guys don't always finish last." He smirked, took a pull on his bottle of Modelo, and never saw John's fist coming. The bottle flew out of his hand and his two front teeth flew out of his mouth. After he went down, John didn't stop kicking until the bouncer cold-cocked him. Jeff wound up with a concussion, four broken ribs, a broken collar bone, a punctured lung, a fractured eye socket, a burst eardrum, and various bruised organs.

I apologized over and over, but he just grinned (then winced because it hurt), said I was worth every bit of it, and besides, it was his own damn fault for shooting his mouth off. He recovered from the beating, went to Texas State, and became a high school math teacher. John spent six months in the Guadalupe County Jail, lost his job at the tire store, and drifted off to west Texas. Last anyone heard, he was working in the oil patch.

Jeff was a sweet boy, but didn't think things through very well; he might as well have put up a billboard saying "I fucked Kat Romano three times and she loved it!" I got so pissed at assholes asking me for a BJ that I was afraid I'd put one of them in the hospital. Marie and Sandy heard about it, of course, so I told them about John ambushing me years before and how I had handled it. They commiserated but said I should have told them at the time; when I explained why I didn't, they just said "Um..." and rolled their eyes.

Heather snickered, of course, and said I got what I deserved for asking a dweeb to the prom. When I told her I might never trust a man again, she just shook her head and said all I needed was to meet a real man. It was the first time I wondered if she really was a friend, but the thought of not being able to share my hopes and fears and dreams with her quickly pushed that thought to rest.

Heather's folks had money, so she went off to UT Austin, pledged Pi Beta Phi, partied hearty, got two abortions and a BA in Communications. I refused to let Marie and Sandy go into debt for me, went to Texas State in San Marcos, and lived at home. They bitched and tried to talk me out of it, but hey, if it was good enough for LBJ (when it was Southwest Texas State Teacher's College), it was sure as hell good enough for me.

Despite the differences in our backgrounds and scruples, every time Heather came home for a holiday visit or the summer we'd spend hours together eating popcorn and drinking beer while watching trashy movies on her parents' giant TV, riding horses on her parents' ranch, or just talking about everything and nothing. Somehow our years in junior high and high school managed to bridge the gaps and let us laugh at our differences.

Heather wanted to be married to some rich guy. I couldn't decide whether I wanted to be a psychiatric nurse or a detective—not too tough to figure out where my career choices came from—so I decided to double major in psychology and Criminal Justice, pretty much a combination of pre-med and pre-law.

I still managed to finish in four years by taking max course loads, plus accredited online courses, and going to summer sessions (including a fascinating internship at the Forensic Anthropology Center studying the foraging habits of vultures). I had enough scholarships and some money (that I reluctantly accepted) from my moms that I made it with no student loans.

In some ways, college was a lot like high school: I studied a lot, played club soccer, moved on to advanced Krav Maga (which meant I had to drive to Austin twice a week). I went on exactly one date, which I terminated abruptly with some of my newly-learned painful discouragements.

We both had drunk entirely too much, so he assumed that I'd be willing to go along with I considered date rape. It took me longer than it should have to discourage him because I really was somewhat impaired, but I finally managed to toss him out of his own car and drive home. I took a handful of Tylenol and a long shower, then returned his car the next day.

I swore off males; all they brought me was trouble. Swore off alcohol, too. Predictably, when I told Heather about it, she just laughed and said I needed to loosen up and pick better fuck buddies.

I should have known better than to trust boys—yeah, most college guys aren't men, they're barely post-adolescent—so I tried a couple of girl-on-girl hookups. My body was sort of with the program but my mind wasn't, at least not enough. And no way was I going to whore myself out to horndog faculty members for better grades (mine were pretty good anyway, thank you very much).

So occasionally I would hook up to get my ashes hauled, but always with some guy I had known reasonably well from sharing a class or two, and only after making my intent and limits clear. And never after drinking.

—————

THE PHONE CALL that changed my life came the second week of my last semester at Texas State. I pretty much never answered a call from a number I didn't recognize, but the caller ID on this one piqued my curiosity: no number, just the words ITS IMPORTANT (I later learned how easy it is to spoof caller ID).

—Hello.

—Kat Romano?

—Who's asking?

—We'd like to interview you for a position.

—Oh really? Who's we? What position?

—You'll learn at the interview. Thursday morning, 9:30, room 225 at the Courtyard.

Oh sure. How dumb did this asshole think I was?

—Yeah, right.

I started to hang up.

—Wait! Are you Katarina Ileana Romano? Daughter of Eleazar Ferdinand Romano, who pimped out your mother, Margaretha Magdalena Romano, to buy their booze and drugs, and killed them both in a wreck while driving drunk? Who ran away from three foster homes by the time she was 10 years old? Adopted daughter of Maria Theresa Wahlberg whose life partner is Sandra Dee O'Conner? About to graduate with a 3.83 GPA, double major in Statistical Psychology and Criminal Justice?

For once I had no smartass comeback. I wasn't just speechless, I broke out in goosebumps. Who the hell was this and how could they know so much about me? I said I'd have to think about it. Please do, they said, and gave me a number to call back. After talking it over with Marie and Sandy, I called back and went to the interview.

Two days later, after further consultation with my moms and a couple of near-sleepless nights, I decided to accept the offer. A condition of accepting required that I sign some documents. Before I could, though, they insisted I actually read them, then go home and ponder for at least 24 hours the really scary consequences of blabbing about my job. I pondered, damn near bailed, then sucked it up and signed.

Over the next nine months of training, I learned how to shoot (everything from .22LR derringers to RPGs), rock climb, fast rope out of a helicopter, and treat wounds as well as a newbie EMT (our kit included all the necessary gear). I could move pretty much unseen and unheard almost anywhere, follow someone without being spotted, and spot someone (or someones) following me. I had to eat some really disgusting things, and go without eating or sleeping for a few days.

The post-doc level Krav Maga sessions showed me what a pussy I still was. I learned that I could hurt someone badly, maybe even kill them, if circumstances demanded it. I also got some really scary insights into foreign policy and realpolitik.

It was the hardest time of my life. I threw up a lot, cried even more, tried to quit three times. I loved it, then hated it, loved it again, hated it again, und so wieter. Loving it finally won. Someday I'll be able to talk about it in more detail.

Our cover was a genuine, working temp agency called Outsource@Home (aka O@H; think Kelly Girl or Manpower on steroids). In addition to the usual administrative services—receptionist, keyboarding, filing, telephone coverage, and the like—we also offered programmers, engineers, and technicians, skilled positions that companies sometimes urgently needed to fill temporarily (they also happened to be skills our team specialists needed). I was assigned to the office in Mountain View, California.

Some of our operations were domestic, but most were international. All field actives rotated to a stint as an actual temp worker every month or two, depending on how many ops they worked and how or stressful they were. Ops could be domestic or international, varied from a couple of days to a couple of weeks; most lasted less than a week and were no more dangerous than waiting to renew your license at the DMV.

Stints as a temp worker varied from a week to a month; the longer ones were needed when someone had to recover from injuries or other trauma. Everyone at O@H was in the business. Those who weren't field actives were either waiting for training or performed support functions such as compiling reports that no one ever read (yeah, it's the same the whole world over).

The whole setup worked beautifully, and I had settled down into what I considered a pretty rewarding life, given how poorly it had begun. Then the wheels came off.

—————

WE HAD WRAPPED the target—literally, but those details don't matter— a couple of days early, so I decided to surprise Mark with a bottle of Laphroaig and a blow job. Turned out he didn't need either one. Those details do matter.

After landing at Travis AFB and taxiing to the restricted zone, the five of us grabbed our gear and humped from the tired G450 to a CH-46 that had also seen better days. We were wheels down 45 minutes later at a remote area of Moffett Field (yeah, sometimes the four-letter guys hobnob with the three-letter guys).

I stowed my gear in our secure building and sat through the obligatory debriefing. After a couple of inappropriate (but hilarious) cracks about carpetbaggers, I changed into my work clothes--slacks, plain white blouse, old-but-still-fairly-nice blazer, flats, shoulder purse—hugged the others goodbye, and dragged my black carry-on out to the butt-ugly motor pool loaner I was driving (my car was in the company shop for some upgrades) Tossing the bag in the back seat, I headed for 101.

The O@H motor pool was a bunch of not-quite-new silver intermediates and white pickups, both of which are about as noticeable in California as Wonder Woman's invisible airplane. For special occasions, a couple of black GMC Yukons had unusually thick and deeply tinted windows, much thicker skin, and some special engine and suspension mods to up the performance despite the extra weight.

(There was also a white Prius, but as far as I know, no one ever used it. I mean really, a Prius?)

Traffic, as usual, was shitty. I didn't get to Morgan Hill until almost 8:00, giving me plenty of time to curse the assholes who thought NASA's presence at Moffat Field made great cover. As I turned onto our street, I was startled to see Heather's yellow Mustang pulling into our driveway. I wasn't startled because she was there—we'd been BFF since forever—but because she knew I was out of town and wasn't due back for a couple of days.

I pulled my 5-year-old Camry over and parked half a dozen doors from our place. Pretty sure that no one would recognize me, I sat and thought about life for a while.

—————

IN MY SIXTH YEAR at O@H, one of my stints as an honest-to-God temp sent me to the Pacific Coast regional office of New American Insurance (NAI). I was officially greeted by a tall, good-looking guy. "Hello, you must be Katerina Romano. I'm Mark Hopkins, more or less responsible for this motley crew and no, unfortunately, my family isn't in the San Francisco hotel business." He reeled that off so naturally it was obvious he had used it dozens, if not hundreds of times, and was careful to grin widely enough to let me know that he was kidding about the motley crew part.

He welcomed me to NAI and gave me my assignment. It was pretty easy: take the place of a data entry clerk who was on vacation. By the second day I finished what was supposed to be that day's work shortly before lunch.

Coming back from the cafeteria, I noticed a woman working away at a computer in an otherwise empty cubicle. She was entering some data into a spreadsheet from a large stack of papers; several boxes filled with similar papers were stacked on the floor beside her. Curious, I stopped to watch. When she finished a paper, she tossed it into another box on the floor.

As I stood looking into her cubicle, Mark Hopkins—the fellow who had given me my assignment—walked by. He stopped, glanced into the cubicle, then gave me a puzzled look. I was flustered; he was tall, good-looking, far enough up the food chain to warrant an office with a door and window, and obviously wondered why the hell I was spying on someone.

Stress control kicked in before I made a fool out of myself by stammering. I looked straight at him. "I've finished all the work I was supposed to do today, and wondered if I could be of help to her. I know Excel pretty well."

Now it was his turn to be flustered. Apparently he wasn't sure how to react to someone who volunteered for more work when she could just spend the rest of the day surfing the net or reading romance novels on her phone. "Uh, that really would be umm...helpful."

He took me in to the cubicle, introduced me, explained that I had offered to help her, then excused himself for a meeting. My offer won a brilliant smile from Susan Something-or-other. She quickly explained that she was entering items from policy applications. Those entries in the corporate database from the past five years had somehow been corrupted, so NAI retrieved the paper forms from archive storage and were recreating the lost data.

She explained what she was doing, took a form from the finished box and highlighted the half-dozen items that needed to be entered, then copied the template for the spreadsheet she was using to a thumb drive. I followed her to the cube next to hers that held a computer and chair. She opened Excel, created a new spreadsheet, and copied the template from the thumb drive.

Returning to her cube, she brought back a box of applications, then breathed a huge sigh of relief. "I can't tell you how much I appreciate this; I wasn't looking forward to doing all these by myself." I waved my hand dismissively and told her I was glad I could help.

The last day of my assignment we finished all the data entry before closing time. Mark said he was sorry to see me go and asked if I would be interested in working for them again. I told him it depended on my schedule, but he could ask for me (did I mention that he was tall and good-looking?). And that, I thought, was that.

—————

I left the next morning for a quick in-and-out op just outside Mexico City. That night I was approaching our target stealthy AF until a charley horse seized my left calf. It went from painful to excruciating in a heartbeat; I lurched into the garbage can I was using for cover. It sounded like dropping a stack of pie tins down a flight of stairs.

An alarm sounded, security lights went on, and our target brought up a Czech vz. 58 the OpPlan had neglected to mention. Our two outliers immediately put four rounds into him center mass, but his finger was on the trigger and he sprayed a burst as he went down. One of his wild shots hit my right thigh. It missed the femur—another inch outside and it would have missed completely—but still lanced a tidy through-and-through.

Even though the FMJ round didn't do a lot of damage, it still hurt like hell. I slapped a field dressing on the exit wound; there wasn't a lot of blood, but I felt myself going into shock. The other team members cleaned up the scene and we got the hell out of Dodge; two guys half-carried me, my arms slung around their shoulders.

On the plane back, our medic specialist cleaned the entry and exit wounds and put proper dressings on them, then gave me injections of an antibiotic and Demerol. I had a happy plane ride back.

Policy required that I spend a month on limited duty. After a week I was bored spitless, so I hobbled in to work and told my boss, Harry Palmer, to put the limited duty where the sun don't shine. No ops, fine, but my typing fingers worked just fine and my leg only hurt when I leaped tall buildings at a single bound. After a hurried consultation, the doc (yes, a real doctor) decided I could start temping again as long as it didn't involve loading refrigerators or testing trampolines.

I completed a couple of short assignments as a receptionist, then New American Insurance called and asked if I could come back for another two weeks. I had a feeling that I knew who had asked for me, and figured I was due for another thrilling gig driving Excel. I was right, but had no idea just how thrilling the drive would be.

—-—-—

AT FIRST IT SEEMED like a replay of my earlier NAI gig: boxes of paper forms to be entered because part of the corporate database had been corrupted. These weren't applications, though, they were claim forms from the same five-year period. It seems a different part of the database had also been corrupted. I didn't know much about databases, but that seemed a bit odd.

Again, only a few of the items on the forms had to be entered in the spreadsheet. I got into a rhythm, and my mind wandered to other things as I mechanically read the items from the form, typed them, then tossed the claim form into the proper box and started the next. (I returned to present in the moment long enough to proof what I entered against the paper form and yeah, I caught some mistakes.)

The second day, as I was working my way through the forms on autopilot just before lunch, my wandering mind finally wondered why the hell didn't they just scan the damn forms and write a program to extract the data they needed? That's probably how they build the database in the first place? I was still chewing on that as I finished my lunch in the cafeteria.

Just as I stood to take my tray to the slop chute (surely it has a more attractive name), Mark stood up from his table across the room carrying his tray. I hustled and managed to get there about the same time he did. "Could I ask you a question, Mr. Hopkins?"

"Anytime, Ms. Romano. What would you like to know?" As he said that, a sort-of smile flickered his face—not a lecherous smile, not a condescending smile, just...amused. Almost friendly. I concentrated on putting my plate and utensils and coffee cup in the proper bins while I re-gathered my thoughts.

"I'm doing exactly the same thing to every claim form, just as I did to every application form a few weeks ago. Wouldn't it make sense to scan the forms and write a program to extract the items you need? Didn't they scan the forms to build the database in the first place?" I hesitated before deciding to mention my other observation. "And it seems a bit odd to me that two different portions of the database covering the same time period were corrupted. Weren't there any backups?"