Beauty and the Beta Tester

There once was a beautiful girl who worked for a big company. And in
the company there were lots and lots of computers. And to look after
these computers were lots and lots of young men. And one of these young
men was called Colin. And this is the story of how Colin met the
beautiful girl.

The beautiful girl, whose name was Honeypuss, worked on the twentieth
floor. She was the marketing manager for the whole South-East Pacific
Region. Colin worked in the basement. Colin's job was to do the second
round of testing on all computer software developed within the company.
He was very proud of his job which he considered very important.

One day Colin caught sight of Honeypuss in the foyer and fell in love.
Honeypuss swept straight past him as if he wasn't there. Colin wanted
very much to know who she was so he logged onto the company's intranet
and searched the company records and photo database. It was not too
long before the background of his screen was her picture and his
computer was called Honeypuss.

But even this was not enough for Colin. He wanted to speak with her. He
didn't know what he wanted to say, but he wanted to say something and
hear her say, "Oh, yes, Colin you are so right." He longed to hear her
whisper beautiful truths into his ears such as, "Of course I think
Linux is better than SunOS," and "Your Java applets are the best I've
ever seen."

But Colin worked in the basement and she worked on the twentieth floor.
They could only see each other in the foyer and in the canteen. He
would never get the chance to speak to her, and she would never even
see his applets. He thought about emailing some of his code directly to
her, but it was too early for that.

Colin consulted the wisest source he knew. The internet. He logged on
to www.fairygodmother.net and entered his wish. "I wish to meet
Honeypuss," he typed into the box. "You should be who you really want
to be in order to fulfil your dreams," it responded. So who did he
really want to be? He thought. "That's it!" he suddenly cried. Colin
really wanted to be Steve.

Steve was Chief Support Engineer in the big company. He was the person
everyone called when they had a problem. He was popular and had no
problem talking with people outside of the IT department. He even had a
girlfriend. He didn't like Star Trek, but nobody's perfect.

Steve was the guy Colin would like to be. If he were like Steve then he
could go up and speak Honeypuss. She could even call him if she had a
problem with her computer. If he was like Steve and also liked Star
Trek, then he would be the most perfect human being in the world.

He went to Steve's office. To be more like Steve, he had to remind
himself what Steve was like. The details. Right down to the setup of
his desktop. Steve wasn't in his office. He must be somewhere else in
the building.

At that moment, www.fairygodmother.net cast her magic cookie and the
telephone rang. Colin would never have ordinarily answered someone
else's telephone. But today he was trying to be Steve. Steve probably
would answer someone else's telephone. And anyway this was Steve's
telephone and Steve would certainly answer his own telephone.

Colin picked it up and put it to his ear. "Hel&;#8230;" he said,
nervously.

"Hi, is that Steve?" Came a female voice. Colin knew instantly who it
was. His legs went wobbly and he had to lean against the desk to stop
from falling over. "This is Honeypuss Jones on the twentieth floor. Can
one of you come up and have a look at my screen. I've lost my Word
icon. Is that okay? Hello? Hello?"

"Er," was all Colin could say, but it was enough.

"How soon can you get up here?" she asked.

Colin tried to say straight away, but his voice failed him.

"Straight away?" suggested Honeypuss.

"Y-y-yes!" blurted out Colin.

"Good, I'll see you then." Honeypuss put the phone down and Colin sat
on the desk breathing at last, the phone still at his ear. His breath
was heavy, his insides all higgledy-piggledy and his heart was beating
nineteen to the dozen. He had heard her voice.

Fifteen minutes later, Colin was on the twentieth floor. He tried in
vein to make his hair stick down for the last time before giving up. He
felt he was as attractive as he was going to get, despite the faint
smell of vomit from throwing up in the toilet in the basement and on
the twentieth floor, as well as the faint smell of urine from kneeling
in a few puddles whilst vomiting.

Honeypuss's desk was across the room. Slowly Colin approached it. It
seemed a long way under the gaze of all these people. Not that many had
even noticed him come in. Honeypuss hadn't. She looked up as he coughed
thinly.

"Ah, here to fix my screen. Well done. Sit down," she said.

How did she know he was there for the computer? She was amazing. He sat
down. Conscious he was sitting in her warmth. In the grove made by her
bottom. And that he was looking at her screen.

Ordinarily, people who have lost their Word icon are stupid in Colin's
eyes. In fact people who use Word instead of X-LinEd were stupid in
Colin's eyes. But Honeypuss was not stupid, therefore she must have
done it deliberately. Perhaps she had known he would be the one to come
up. Somehow. Women's intuition, maybe.

"It was there this morning," she said pointing with her beautiful
finger to a vague patch of empty screen. "I must have deleted it. Can
you get it back?"

Of course he could. It was a simple task, even for a Beta Tester. He
would gladly bring her icon back. He would bring it back a 1000 times
all over her screen if she wanted. He would make it so that it appeared
in every menu of every application, if she asked. He could make it so
large it that it was bigger than the display if that was what she
liked.

Colin recreated the icon and stood up.

"Thank you," said Honeypuss and sat back down. She went right back to
work and Colin was left standing behind her, unsure what to do. Now was
the time to say something, if any time was. Now. But what could he say?
He had to say something. Or he should go. Even he knew it was socially
unacceptable to remain standing behind her. Close enough to touch her
hair but too far away, it seemed, to say anything.

No he had to say something. Anything. All he could think to tell her
was the operating system of the file server she was using. It wasn't
much, but it could be an icebreaker at least.

"It's Linux," he said.

Honeypuss turned round, surprised that he was still there.

"Oh. Honeypuss," she told him with a nod of greeting. "Thank you
again," she said pleasantly and went back to her work.

Colin knew it was time to leave. It hadn't been the way he had intended
it, but it had been a sort of conversation at least. You couldn't
expect big things the first time.

It was three days later before he saw her again, despite always walking
slowly through the foyer and lingering longer than usual in the
canteen. She walked straight past him, but as she waited at the lifts
he caught up with her and said, "Hi."

She turned and saw him. "Hi," she responded. Then she remembered him.
"Oh, yes. You retrieved my icon. Linux, isn't it?"

Colin wanted to tell her that no, that wasn't his name, and in fact his
name was Colin and that Linux was merely his favourite operating system
and although he didn't mind being named after the best operating system
in the world, there was a lot more to him than that. But instead he
nodded.

"Well, thanks again, Linux," she said. The lift appeared and she got in
it. Colin walked down the stairs.

Over the weeks. Colin's love grew. Fuelled by occasional glimpses and
the times she spoke to him. Never any more than, "Hi," or, "Hi, Linux,"
but that was enough. Linux was no longer her mistake to him but the pet
name she used for him alone.

Every time a new picture of her appeared on the company intranet, it
became his background. As the weeks went by, this wasn't enough, and he
would scour the porn sites for pictures of people that looked like her.
Colin was sure her love for him grew at the same exponential rate his
did for her.

So that when he emailed her and asked if she wanted to go for a drink
or something, and she responded saying, "who is this?" he was
mortified. He had not signed it, and the email account obviously made
no reference to Linux. He sent one back saying, "Linux," and attached
his latest Java program.

She was busy that night. And the next night. In fact it was a busy
month and she never made appointments more than three weeks in
advance.

Colin realised that the course of their true love was not running
smooth. Her job was keeping them apart. It demanded action. "Fate
favours the brave," Captain Kirk had once said, and if ever there was a
time to act upon that, it was now.

Honeypuss's home address was not on the intranet, and whoever kept the
personnel files knew what they were doing. They were encrypted and
password-protected.

Colin did what Captain Kirk had advised and what he felt Steve would
have done. He followed her home. The first time to know where it was.
After that, because he enjoyed being near her. On the fourth night, she
confronted him on the street and demanded to know what he was doing.
"Proving my love," he told her.

Honeypuss proved her love by giving him more time in which to pursue
her by getting him sacked.

Colin proved his love by pitching a tent just in front of her
garden.

Honeypuss must have found this too painful because she had some
policemen to remove him.

Colin proved his determination by returning.

Honeypuss invited Colin to appear with her in front of a judge. They
went through a lovely ceremony and at the end the judge told him he had
to stay more than five hundred yards away from her.

But that was easy to overcome. You can email anyone in the world from
any distance away and you can do it every thirty seconds. Plus if they
are at work. Their own house is more than five hundred yards away from
them.

Honeypuss invited Colin to appear with her in front of another judge.
This one sent him to a place where they had no internet and the
computers were all out of date. It was a horrible punishment.

After six months he was let out. He didn't want to leave. He had grown
to like it there. He had been put in charge of the computers. He hadn't
been able to get internet access installed, but there were many new
computers on the network and the server, Honeypuss, was running Linux -
the latest Beta release.

When he came out, Honeypuss had got married, changed jobs and moved
house. He knew he could probably trace her somehow using the internet,
but he didn't want to. In those five year she had clearly fallen out of
love with him and had not visited him even once. Besides he had a new
job himself. He worked for Mr Bigg whom he had met in the prison. For
him he helped with financial transactions and found out all sorts of
information by searching or even by hacking if he had to. He also
always had the latest equipment and money for peripherals was no
object. It was a techie dream job.

And Mr Bigg even found him a replacement for Honeypuss. Her name was
Rita and although he had to share her, she agreed with anything he said
about Linux, Java, etc. She would listen to him for hours staring at
him or the wall. She did all those things he imagined he would do with
Honeypuss - the conversations, the walking hand-in-hand and the other
things; and she called him Linux because he wanted her to. On his
computer background there were pictures of her doing disgusting things
and they really were of her. And what's more, he had taken them
himself.

And everyone lived happily ever after. Except perhaps Rita who died of
an overdose two years later, but even so, Colin had enough pictures to
continue the relationship for a few months and Mr Bigg had dozens and
dozens more girls where she came from.

[EOF]