“As Fawn and Dorian get closer to the truth, their undeniable chemistry leads to an awkwardly timed make-out session while hiding in a dumpster. However, their passion is soon tested when she discovers a shocking twist: Dorian was involved in the conspiracy all along!”
“No!”
“Yup! Just as she decides she can’t trust him, the obvious villain—a corrupt senator with a mustache he twirls unironically—kidnaps Fawn and takes her to an abandoned warehouse. Dorian arrives just in time for a final showdown. The senator is defeated when he trips over a conveniently placed box, and Dorian and Fawn confess their love in the middle of the burning warehouse.” I let out a long, dramatic breath. “It has everything! Action, suspense, romance, confusion…I think this one’s the winner!”
She’s laughing, but I’m not sure if it’s because she likes the idea or she’s just humoring me. “Oh, it’s something alright,” she says after a moment. “I’m seriously impressed at all the effort you put into it.”
“I have a few more ideas if you’re interested!”
“Um…let’s pace ourselves. I promise to listen to one each night until you get through all of them. How does that sound?”
“Like you’re definitely just humoring me,” I murmur.
“Aww…maybe I am. Just a little,” she admits. “But I love how determined you are to help me with this. Maybe I need a tech guy like you. Tell me what a typical day is like when you’re on a troubleshooting job.”
“Seriously? I don’t see how…?”
“You never know where inspiration is going to come from. Humor me. Please.”
I groan, thinking about my day today. “Okay, but it’s incredibly boring, so…try not to fall asleep.”
She whines my name, so I just give in.
“Fine. We had an issue today where there were these constant beeping of alerts from the network operations center telling me something was wrong. So I pulled up the network topology map—which is a visual representation like a diagram that illustrates the arrangement and connections of devices within a network, showing how they communicate and interact. Anyway, users had been complaining about intermittent connectivity issues all day, and now, an entire wing of the office was completely offline.”
“Was anyone able to work?”
“Nope. So there was a lot of pressure on me to figure out this particular problem. First, I pinged the gateway and nothing happened. Next, I tried trace routing. That’s a network diagnostic tool used to trace the path data packets take from a source to a destination, identifying the routers—or hops—along the way and the time it takes for each hop, but the packets were vanishing into the void.”
“Um…I’m officially lost.”
But that doesn’t stop me, because now I’m trying to prove a point.
“The obvious next step was to access the switch logs, and I scrolled past a sea of cryptic error messages like, ‘STP topology change detected…’ That’s a very common one, you know.”
“Uh-huh…”
“It means Spanning Tree Protocol. Something was causing loops in the network. My immediate thought was that it was possibly a rogue device. It happens from time to time. People plug things into the network on the sly and don’t realize the havoc it can cause. So, I quickly checked the MAC address tables, and that’s when I saw it—a single port was flooding the network with broadcasts. I love when I can detect the source of the problem.”
“Then everything was fixed?”
“Not yet. I had to grab my tablet and network scanner, and then I was able to trace the problem down to a small and forgotten conference room! I raced down there, and as soon as I stepped inside, I spotted the culprit—a dusty, unauthorized network switch plugged into the wall, looping two ports into each other like a snake eating its own tail!”
“Oh, wow! Look at you!”
“I know, right? So with a quick yank, I unplugged the rogue switch, and watched all the network alerts clear up almost instantly.”
“You were the hero! Yay, you!”
“Well…some called me a legend, but…that’s neither here nor there,” I humbly brag.
“Aww…were you wearing your glasses? Did Clark Kent solve the issue or Superman?”
I laugh. “A true hero never tells. I’m just glad it all worked out. This job has a lot of these weird issues, and I think someone in the office is trying to tie into the company network on the sly. I have a meeting with management tomorrow to discuss what to do next.”
“This all sounds very intense, and it sounds like there’s a bit of intrigue here—as in the suspense of a romantic suspense! Ash! This could be something!”
I’m frowning. “But…wasn’t that boring? Hell, I had to keep from yawning as I was telling the story.”
