Work Text:
"Hi, Ben," Paul started, "thanks for coming over. You see, Meg said it's the-"
He didn't need to explain, the effin' Mac was clearly Not Working. "I'm not IT, I'm a developer, why don't you ever- what did you do to this thing, moonbeam?"
Paul was Testing, Ben was on the Prototype Simulation side of the division, all clean dry lines of code on a triple monitor setup that took up most of a cube all by itself, which got him out of hotdesking, thank you, while Testing, which spent most of their time in the fab lab or the field, shuffled around whichever desks were open that day.
When the guys - mostly guys, in Simulation - asked how he got sucked into fixing Dek's inevitably skuzzed-up laptop, he'd say something about the first time he got caught at it, IT swearing they needed a full wipe and backup from the last image and Paul losing it at increasing volume, something about a seven day field run, test records, and a fried auto-upload to the secure server. He'd fixed IT's problem, he'd gone cloud-crawling for the missing files, he'd left everyone happy except Mitch from IT. Let the guys think he'd had a lucky guess... rather than the truth, which was that Paul and Ben had known each other back before Fleet Designs had been a Thing. No chance he was going to get known as Ben in Sims Who Can Retrieve Those Files You Accidentally Nuked. No, this was a favor for certain people, not for general knowledge.
Certain people like one of the few non-guys on Simulation’s radar. "Hey, Sal."
"Ben!" Sal favored colorful sweaters over t-shirts cut to the neck in the office, but Ben had seen her at the bars, flashing smooth dark skin and ink that made half the men in the room follow her with their eyes, and Ben was pretty certain the other half just didn't swing that way. Not until someone got Sal talking about database structure, SQL, big data analytics... they'd started to talk one night, gone back to his place with, Ben had hoped, a plan to get certain kinks mutually satisfied, and gotten side-tracked into unkinking a mess in the data-collection to processing code. They'd wound up spread out on the bed with two laptops, copious coffee, and a solution that had gotten both of them serious kudos at the next all hands meeting.
And after they'd gone out for celebratory drinks with Bird and the rest of the team, Sal had knocked down three guys angling to work on “team projects” that were no such thing, came back to his apartment talking the finer points of code Ben knew from a brutal university program and Sal from hard-won what-works, dropped her laptop bag on the floor and fucked him senseless. Possibly the best night in his short life.
“Dek got you fixin’ other people’s laptops now, huh?” Sal asked, with a cheeky smile.
Ben looked again at the MacBook, and specifically at the back, colorfully decorated with very non-IT-approved stickers. “Paul,” he said slowly, “why do you have Meg’s laptop?”
“Well, Meg had to finish the run. She said to tell you it’s the wi-fi giving her problems.”
Well, and that explained that. Meg had serious objections to Apple as a corporation, and anything to do with handing her field laptop over to other people to fix. Ben sighed, and brought up a Terminal window.