Chap 2 of The Corn Siege by Anthony Horvath
Beau had graduated from Northwestern. All his superiors (and there were many) had graduated from Yale and Harvard and they made sure the Beau and the rest of the staff were well aware of this fact. Beau didn’t let this bother him too much, as he knew the truth: if not for people like himself, upper management wouldn’t be able to get anything done. Some days, Beau reflected on the fact that there were as many ‘superiors’ as there were in the support staff—department heads, deputy department heads, sub-department heads, deputy to the deputy to the deputy, so on and so forth, but did they know how to dial up the manager at an obscure power plant in the Midwest? Of course not. The ‘superiors’ may make the decisions, but it was people like himself who carried them out.
This was extremely relevant because unlike in the previous administration, his superiors were permitted (nay, encouraged) to make as many decisions as they wanted or felt to be prudent. This was one of the glorious things to have returned to normal with the new administration—this administration respected experts and expertise and were happy to keep their budgets big but otherwise mind their own business. The ‘big budget’ part was one of the things Beau liked most, as in the previous administration he always wondered if this were going to be the day when he’d come in and find his whole department axed. He was secure once again.
Shortly after lunch, Clive came into Beau’s office. Clive was the outlier to them all.
“Hey, A-SOC wants you to run the TPS reports for the ON-TOX system. The algos are spooked and that means Kamala is spooked. We’ve got to get to the bottom of it,” Clive said.
“You wrote the algorithms, why don’t you run the reports,” Beau said, trying to soften the edge in his voice.
“First of all, because A-SOC wants you to do it. Which is why I am in here talking with you. Second of all, because A-SOC wants me to re-write the encryption script for the Dynamax system… unless…” Clive tilted his head inquisitively at Beau, “…unless you are able to revise the encryption script?”
“I only have my MBA…” Beau started, before realizing that Clive was playing with him.
“Learn to code, bro,” Clive said, and left.
George, the other person who worked in the office with Beau, lifted his head up. “Effing Rainman,” he said, and then put his head back down.
“Effing Rainman,” Beau agreed. Then he opened up his terminal so he could begin the tedious process of running TPS reports on the clunky ON-TOX system. If Clive had designed the ON-TOX system or created the program for generating TPS reports, it would take all of five minutes to complete the task. For that matter, if Clive, or three guys just like him, had generated the software for the entire Department of Energy and designed the databases themselves, they could fire half of the people who worked in the DoE, if not more, and not lose a step. It was precisely for this reason that Clive, or three guys just like him, had not been allowed to design or re-design their systems. It was also for this reason that Clive was secretly loathed by almost everyone at the DoE. Certainly, the support staff hated him, as there was a very real sense that Clive had all of their jobs in his hand. All they had to do is let the man do his thing and Beau and George and a few hundred people just like them would be sending out resumes. But most of the ‘superiors’ hated him as well, and they all called him Rainman.
Clive graduated from some silly community college in rural Nebraska, and not even with a degree in programming. His degree was in something stupid like English Literature. His programming abilities were honed in his bedroom starting in middle school and he apparently refined them and expanded on them while working as a mechanic at a local farm machinery repair shop. Contemporary tractors and combines all interfaced thoroughly with software, much of it connected to the Internet somehow, which meant that even the old-school mechanics that normally could have fixed a tractor with a bit of wire and some duct tape needed the help of the computer savvy on a regular basis.
Clive had already earned his nickname of “Rainman” before he earned the resentment of those at the DoE. He earned the ire of Beau’s superiors in an infamous committee meeting when all of the committee heads struggled to login to the FOLEY network and Clive was sent in to help. Thirty seconds later, Clive had them all logged in, and to their chagrin, they realized that their inability to login was due to a stupid blunder on their part. To paper over his embarrassment, one of the department heads said to Clive, “Nice to have a whiz kid working for us.” And Clive replied, “What, me? People like me are a dime a dozen back home. You just can’t find them at Harvard, is all.”