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Is the Rookie Ready?

* Sarah Green

FROM THE DECEMBER 2009 ISSUE

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Is the Rookie Ready?

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December 2009 Issue

EXPLORE THE ARCHIVE

Buy gift wrap—lots.

New Year’s Day reservations—Café Paris? (Too much $$?)

Tim O’Connell paused, pen hovering above his Driscoll Software notepad, to watch the snow swirling outside his window. Then, decisively, the ballpoint descended: More stamps.

The phone rang, and he reached for it, his mind still on his to-do list. What am I forgetting? “This is Tim O’Connell,” he said. The conversation that followed drove all holiday thoughts from his mind.

Twenty minutes later he put the handset back in its cradle.

The Client That Stole Christmas

Chewing a large bite of turkey sandwich, Kristen Hammersmith pressed her palms together behind her back, relishing the series of cracks and pops between her shoulders. It had been a long year, and she’d spent too much of it hunched over this desk. She believed that Driscoll did important work—building reliable, if expensive, software for businesses whose systems couldn’t afford to fail—but it could be stressful. Sometimes she had nightmares about a bug in the Driscoll system that operated airplane landing gear.

The past few months had seen more turmoil than usual. Kristen’s boss, Alessandra Sandoval, had decamped to set up her own business as a technical consultant. The move had come as a relief, because Alessandra and Tim, the unit head, didn’t exactly mesh. Tim was a classic software geek—methodical, khaki-clad, and, unless you were cracking jokes about binary code, fairly reserved. He had been visibly uncomfortable with Alessandra’s almost hackeresque persona: her sarcastic sense of humor, visible tattoos, and odd hours. Her Vespa was more likely to be in the company lot at 9:00 PMthan at 9:00 AM. She could find bugs faster than anyone else...