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The Transport -
It's all true. The USA found a crashed alien spaceship in the 1950ies and hid it from the world...
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The current boss of the Data Analytics department had changed two things after he had started about three months ago. First, he had renamed the department to Rapid Analytics — "Time is money, folks. Quicker results in the hands of our scientists means earlier revenues." Second, the new boss had introduced agile project management and enforced a daily stand-up routine.
Pity it's not daily stand-up comedy. Leo would have liked that, he was good with one-liners. Instead, every morning at 9:30, the Data Analy... eh, Rapid Analytics team would gather around the large status board that contained small cards with new and pending tasks, and everyone would give a short update to the rest of the gang. Leo hated this waste of time. Why would anybody be interested in the analysis task of anyone else? An analysis was an analysis and in this company yesterday's analysis was the same as the one tomorrow. Standard stuff, no challenge, extract, load, transform, report, over and out. They were drones in a hive, after all. He is ordinary! the Foo Fighters played in Leo's head.
"Leo?" the boss queried, snapping him out of his head-banging musical dream.
"Yeah, today I plan to finish the PC-34 report. It needs some data re-mapping. After that I'll take the next assignment from the board, TP-133 if you are okay with this."
"TP-133 is better with Stacy," the boss suggested. He was always micro-managing the team's assignments, the opposite of the agile organization approach. Leo could see from his colleague's vacant look that she didn't care one way or the other, but the boss liked Stacy and TP-133 was cutting edge stuff and the future cash-cow of the company. Good exposure for her.
Perhaps the boss wanted to get into her pants? Good luck, man. I've seen her hunk of a husband.
"All right, then it is the quality threshold report for me, it's on backlog for a week already," Leo said, trying his best to sound eager. Everyone but the boss knew that this one was called "the surfer", because it was five minutes of work thanks to a genius data collection automation script that allowed you to surf the internet for the remains of the day.
The only merciful thing about the stand-up: it was over quickly. Leo sat down behind the screen and started the download procedures to gather last month's logs. That would take a few minutes, time enough to grab another coffee.
The water cooler talk was all about the two mysterious ladies, even among the female coworkers. Leo poured his coffee, threw in some chatter, walked back in slow motion and was just about to sit down again, his mind still circling around the way the hot babe had walked up to the entrance. His boss popped his head into Leo's cubicle. "You got a minute?"
