“Nothing?” When I finished my degree, I never envisioned this was how I’d be putting it to use.
“Nothing. The damn wheel is spinning and spinning.”
Thank God for that. Sometimes technology can be unpredictable, and I’d have to hop on the streetcar and go down there to walk him through something that should have happened automatically overnight.
“Still spinning?” I say.
“No.” His voice has lost some of its earlier fury. “Now there’s a menu.”
I do a quiet fist pump, and Ramona giggles. “What does the menu say?” I ask, trying to keep the glee out of my voice.
“Do you want to import contacts?”
Which is exactly what we talked about last night. When I showed up to help him finish getting his phone set up, he’d been on a call. I wound up waiting for almost forty-five minutes. Finally turning his attention to me, he’d said, “You have me for five minutes, and then I have to go.”
I would take him for any time he would give me, but not in his office, and not like he meant. So instead, I’d scrambled to get his email pushed over, synced up his calendar, and given him the very simple instruction of “plug your phone into your computer tonight so your contacts will download automatically.”
Which he had obviously completely forgotten.
“And do you want to import your contacts?” I say, unable to stop the grin that slides over my face.
“Don’t get smart with me, Brady,” he snarls, but his words only make me smile more.
“No, no, sir. Not smart.” Never mind that I run my own company. I am the lowly IT consultant, and he’s the big, bad, big-city executive.
And also, never mind that he’s in charge of a queer film festival, not a bank or a real estate conglomerate. We all have our roles to play.
“Is it syncing?” I say.
His pause before his sheepish yes tells me everything I need to know. I have fought the dragon and lived to fight another day.
“Is there anything else you need this morning?”
He grumbles for a minute. “The new marketing intern is starting on Monday.”
“Harpreet has his laptop.”
“But he doesn’t get a phone,” Nash says.
“No, sir,” I drawl. “The minimum wage intern does not get any perks.” Frankly, I’m glad Nash is paying him. He’s probably nineteen and has an unlimited data plan on his own phone. No sense giving him company collateral on top of that.
“It’s done,” Nash says.
“And are your contacts there?”
In the silence, I can picture him, the frown he gets where his whole forehead wrinkles and his lower lip pushes out.
“I think so.” He harrumphs, and for a second, I expect him to call me a whippersnapper. He’s older than I am, for sure, but he’s not my grandfather. “Okay. This looks better. If it’s not, I’ll be in touch.”
“Of course. I’m a phone call away.” I’m smiling so hard my cheeks hurt because Nash O’Hara would be lost without me, and Ramona’s making kissy noises.
He never says goodbye when our calls are over. The line goes quiet, and I’m supposed to take that as a job well done. I groan as I stretch, and Ramona laughs.
“Nash again?”
“Who else?” I scrub my eyes with my hands. “Oh my God. That guy. He’s so old-school about tech, it’s adorable. Sometimes I can’t decide if I want to call him daddy or if I want to call himdaddy.”
She gasps theatrically. We’ve been making variations of this joke for months.
