Quarantine Pet - His Pet

There was a knock at the door.

“Sandra,” said Jack from the other side. “We’re all set with Laurel. C’mon, we’re out of here for now. We should get back and arrange for duplicate documents to be sent over.”

“Okay, coming,” I announced.

Chapter Three – Jack

For the next few weeks, we got the new office set up and worked on the merger. Cam Tech’s assets were more complicated than initially advertised. Their founder had placed all sorts of investments under the company that weren’t widely known. Mostly, he did it to avoid paying taxes on certain things and to shift funds from this division or that when his accountants needed to. When he passed on, many of the assets were just forgotten about.

McKenzie Tech had the opposite problem. While Cam Tech’s paperwork was kind of all over the place, missing or was a mess, McKenzie Tech had everything correctly accounted for. However, their in-house bureaucracy required double, triple, and sometimes quadruple the paperwork. They had literally sent three copies of everything.

Now that doesn’t sound very bad until you realize that the company was sending over close to two million pages of paperwork. You’d think in this age of computers, we wouldn’t need such formalities. In some respects, it was easier just to create new virtual paperwork for Cam Tech. But with McKenzie Tech, we had to at least go through the boxes. I mean, we were billing for the time, the firm would make a small fortune just doing the inventory.

Sanjay and Pete were sent over to help. They were two associates that I had worked with before. Sanjay was a great kid and a hard worker. Pete was kind of a suck up to the Davies brothers. If anyone had to be kept out of the loop about my attraction to Sandra, it was him. Most likely, he was sent over to make sure I wasn’t making goo-goo eyes at her.

Unfortunately, as much as I wanted to deny it myself, there was unbelievable chemistry between Sandra and me. We just clicked in so many ways. It was like we had a secret language that only the two of us knew. I brought in my personal cell phone, and when I wanted to flirt with her, I’d do it through that. No sense in risking the firm getting access to our messages.

“Okay, guys,” I said over lunch. “Let’s have a brief meeting while we’re eating. Where are we on cataloging Cam Tech stuff?”

“We brought in a scanner,” explained Sanjay. “If we can hire two more office workers to scan it back into the computer, it should save us some time.”

“Are you kidding? Can’t Cam Tech just send us the files?” I demanded.

“Called them,” said Pete with a mouthful of Chinese food. “These guys are ridiculous, boss. When I asked them for the files, they said I had to fill out a form for each individual file. The bureaucracy there is off the charts!”

“There’s gotta be a better way to do this,” I muttered.

“I think I know,” suggested Sandra. “If Sanjay hires the office workers and we scan it all back in, there’s a program we can use called BP Solution. It stands for Big Picture. It uses AI technology to read everything, and then you just ask the AI questions for whatever you need.”

“No way, boss,” dismissed Pete. “Obviously, we want to cut down the workload here, but you’re talking about a database. You’d still have to ask it the right question.”

“No, it’s more sophisticated than that,” Sandra insisted. “Over time, if you keep asking it questions, it learns the pattern of information you want. It also makes suggestions, once you start using it, based on your patterns of inquiry.”

“Sounds better than reading two million sheets of paper,” I concluded. “Get on it, Sandra. Nice work.”

Pete made a face. The guy didn’t like to be shown up at a meeting, but oh well. Sandra had ideas. He was just here to kiss my butt and try to climb the firm’s corporate ladder.

The additional purchases required us to bring in an IT expert and a total of six other employees. Sounds big, but we were still at skeleton crew levels for a merger this big. At the end of the day, companies like Cam Tech and McKenzie Tech just split the cost and pulled it out of their massive profits. Everyone was going to be making money at the end of this, so no one cared about a few hundred thousand dollars in expenses. With billions at stake, that was just a rounding error.

A week later, I walked into the storage room. I found Sanjay and Sandra standing around talking. It seemed like an awkward moment between them.

“Oh, hey boss,” Sanjay said nervously. “I’ll talk to you later, Sandra.”

Sanjay abruptly exited.

“What was that all about?” I asked.