Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-31062126-20170116043719

(Feel free to providefeedback and reviews.) __________________

My love for computers can be traced back to the spring of 1994. At that time, most schools didn’t have computer labs or software studies. I went to school in a small town where junior high and high school both took place together in one building. The school could accommodate up to 700 students.

So, it was in no means a one room building like you might see on classic television shows such as “Little House on The Prairie.” We didn’t have a middle school to act as a stepping stone that would prepare us for the hell that was high school, so we were thrown right into the lion’s den. But I digress.

When it came to high school, I was not the most popular boy by any means, but I wasn’t a complete outcast either. I settled somewhere in the middle you might say. I played football, and was pretty good at it. I also played chess and became known as “the computer guy.”

My first exposure to any type of computer system was in my geometry class. It was a normal classroom, but around the walls they had six or seven old Apple computer systems. As I said before, we didn’t have anything special. This was well before USB ports were even a thing. Now, we aren’t talking Apple IIE here, but they were early generation Macintosh systems.

This is how I met my friend Jake. I had procured a floppy disk from an undisclosed location in which I needed to somehow gain access. I knew little more than the disk in question was supposed to have two full color photos of naked women for my viewing pleasure. I didn’t have a computer at home at the time. In fact, at that point, I had never used a computer in my entire life.

As I mentioned earlier, I played chess in school. We even had a small after school club. After our meeting, I snuck into my geometry class after the teacher had gone home. I made sure no one was around, and popped that floppy disk into the system. Now what? I had absolutely no idea what to do.

The icon for the diskette appeared on the desktop, but nothing happened when I clicked the icon. So, I started clicking frantically on the icon, and finally was prompted with a menu asking me what I would like to use to open this unknown file.

I tried everything from text editors to the painting program, but all that I could get to appear was garbled characters in a jumbled mess. I was getting more and more frustrated at the situation, and eventually my anger got the best of me and I hit the desk quite hard. It made a huge “THUD.” It was then that I heard someone laughing maniacally behind me. My heart sank as I spun around in my seat.

“I was just trying to play “Myst..” I said frantically. I had heard other students talking about playing the game on those systems, but I had actually known nothing about it whatsoever. To my surprise, it wasn’t a teacher or even an adult for that matter. It was just another student I had seen using the systems recently. I wasn't sure at the time, but I thought his name was Jake. I was relieved, but still a bit uneasy because the disk was still in the system, and I had no idea how to go about forcing this computer to cough it up.

Apparently, all young men actually do think alike. Jake knew almost immediately what I was up to. “You need a photo viewer to open photos.” Again, I protested. “What are you talking about? I was just trying to play “Myst,” but this stupid thing wouldn’t work!”

He grinned slightly, and walked over to where I was sitting. He leaned down, grabbed the mouse, and magically my “special disk” ejected from the system. “I don’t remember Myst needing one old disk with the label torn off to run. In fact, it should be installed on here already and wouldn't need any disks at all.” He said with a snarky look on his face. I grabbed for the disk, but he was faster. My heart sank because I just knew he was going to rat me out. “Look man. Don’t freak out. I’m not going to squeal on you. If you really want to see the “content” on this disk, you can come over to my house. I have a PC that I built myself that you can use.”

I couldn’t argue with that offer, so off we went. Jake only lived a mile or so from the school so it took no time to get to his house. His mom and dad were in the living room watching an old Science Fiction movie when we got there. I had never met them before, but they were surprisingly nice. They offered me food, and they had a nice selection of soda to choose from.

The house was two stories and very well built. We threw down our backpacks and went upstairs to Jake’s room. Sure enough, he had a huge tower PC in his room by his desk. It was massive. He said that his mom used to be a programmer, and so he had been into computers for a very long time.

She even taught him how to build them as well. I didn’t know anything about what specs were good or even that I should be impressed when he spouted off things like how it had a 75 MHz Intel Processor, 4 Megabytes of RAM, and a 14.4Kbps modem.

We sat down at his desk, and he popped the disk into that huge tower PC. “This is what I was talking about at school.” He said, as he opened up a program called LVIEW PRO. “The operating system has to have a program installed that knows how to handle the file you want to open.” He added.

He proceeded to open the files on the disk and sure enough, two of the most beautiful women I had ever seen in my entire life were displayed in full color on the screen before me. They were completely naked, and let me tell you that nothing was left to the imagination.

It was a glorious day for a 15-year-old boy by adolescent standards. I would come to find out later all of the huge differences between the Macintosh computers at school, and the Windows 3.11 PC Jake had.

You want to see something even cooler than these pics?” He said proudly. I was extremely skeptical that he could possess anything cooler than photos of naked women, but I decided to humor him. “If you can top what we just saw, count me in.” I said with a smirk.

He began clicking around on the system and eventually opened up something called “DOOM.” I watched as he navigated the menus and manually set things like his audio/video hardware preferences. Then, he was giving a choice of difficulty that started with “I’m Too Young To Die” and went all the way up to something called “Nightmare!” Jake chose the middle difficulty and began.

By this point I had figured out it was some kind of game, but had never seen anything like it before. I had a Nintendo and Super Nintendo at home, but I had no idea you could play games this violent on a computer. He then let me take a turn playing DOOM. It was so much fun that I was immediately enthralled. Before I knew it, more than two hours had passed. I thanked Jake, and ran down the stairs, grabbed my stuff, and headed home.

After that day, Jake and I became good friends. I taught him how to play chess, and he taught me everything he knew about computers. The next step was for me to get a PC of my own. Jake had told me that if I had one too, we could dial up to each other via our modems, and play Doom one on one. This really pushed me over the edge. He made me a copy of the game on several disks, and now all I needed was a PC of my own. I saved every penny I could for the next few months, and just before Christmas I finally got my dad to agree to help me buy one.

We went to Wal-Mart that night to see what they had. This was back when they had demo units out on shelves for you to click around on and play with a little. They had several models. An AST which was a 486, a Hewlett Packard with a Pentium 60 MHz processor, and one made by a company called Packard Bell. The Packard Bell system was the most powerful at 75 MHz so that is the one I insisted we get.

At that point Windows 95 had just came out, and it came preloaded on the system. It was the latest and greatest. So, why not? Right? I even got a printer out of the deal after convincing dad that I could use it to print out letters and flyers for him when he so needed.

Over the years, Jake and I stayed close friends. In 1996, we jumped on the Duke Nukem 3D craze since we could play each other one on one with it as well. That was the same year dial-up Internet service finally became available in our little town. Before that, we were stuck with bulletin board systems, and dialing each other to play our limited game selection.

The Internet changed everything. It gave way to the birth of chat rooms, e-mail, and all sorts of pictures/videos that would make your mother faint. Then later with the birth of broadband Internet, things got even more interesting. But we’ll get to that later.

After high school, Jake and I decided to open a local computer repair shop within the city limits of our little town. I had been working for a guy who had the shop for years, and he had a pretty good client base already established. He had been looking to retire, so Jake and I talked about it and decided to buy him out.

We did just that, and moved to a bigger location on the main street in town. Business was steady at first, but got even better over time once more people got to know us. I took care of the in-store work, and Jake handled calls to businesses and homes in the area. I took a great deal of pride in my work, and often paid a fair amount of attention to detail when it comes to software licensing and other documentation.

I have found that over the years it has been a great benefit to read the fine print on all sorts of agreements. On one occasion, a piece of software actually had a clause in the EULA that stated if you sent them an email with your serial number, a certain message in the subject line, along with a predetermined statement that had been provided, the company would provide you with a rebate and free software upgrades for life. The PC Pitstop software offered compensation of $1,000 to a limited number of licensed customer who sent an email to a specified address in their EULA. It was sneaky, but also a good way to see who is reading these licensing agreements.

That was one of the big differences between Jake and me. He had a bad habit of just flying through things halfcocked while not really paying attention to what he was doing. This often caused us both aggravation because he would forget appointments or get the time wrong because he skimmed an email from a customer. I tried to keep him on track for the most part, but I had a great deal to do at the shop myself.

After about a year, we had established ourselves as the “Go To” repair shop for miles around, which meant we were getting a great deal of walk-in customers as well as more and more businesses offering us contracts. We even scored a huge contract with the city/county government which meant we handled the Police Station, Ambulance Service, and 911 Dispatch Center. This was really a great boost for our small business, and it sure did keep us busy. We would often get calls at all hours of the night needing to go out to one of the service areas for an emergency repair.

As good as things were for us at that time, this is also where the problems started as well. The 911 Dispatch Center had requested a complete system upgrade that would be done in two phases. First the dispatchers would get brand new systems, and if that went well, we would then start replacing the servers with more powerful blade servers.

We could have built the dispatcher systems, but we didn’t want a huge headache if there were any part failures down the road. So, for those, we went with Dell Precision Workstations. They are pricey, but are the definition of work horses. Also, with next business day replacement service, if a part failed, we could have a replacement to swap into the system the very next morning in most cases. Everything about the hardware swap seemed to go quite well, which was a huge relief for both of us.

The 911 Dispatch Center had some really strange software requirements that I had never heard of before. This went way beyond medical HIPAA security policies and even required DOD (Department of Defense) background checks and special certifications. I rarely went onsite because I took care of the shop, but I still had to jump through all of those crazy hoops just like Jake.

Occasionally, we would get a call about a software error that we could repair remotely by securely connecting to their network, and taking control of the system. This sounds easy enough, but was quite a hassle. We had to use a special Citrix secure VPN connection just to get onto their network. Then every click we made was monitored and recorded. It was really creepy to say the least. But the alternative was driving up there to accomplish the same thing and still have everything monitored. This was the lesser of two evils.

The workload became way too much for us to handle alone, so we decided to hire someone who could work in the shop and go on calls if needed. Our shop wasn’t that far from a pretty large technological university which provided an ample number of smart young kids needing a job.

Around the same time, my fiancé and I had been planning our wedding. I had helped as much as possible with the interviews, but ultimately Jake would have to finish the process. The following weekend was my wedding, and my new wife and I went on our honeymoon to Cape Hatteras to see the famous lighthouse.

She absolutely loved lighthouses, and this was by far her favorite. She also loved Monster Jam monster trucks. I had planned for us to spend a few days in North Carolina, then I was going to surprise her by taking her to Vegas to the Monster Jam finals. Her favorite driver is Dennis Anderson in Gravedigger, and he was going to be there. Everything went off without a hitch. We had a great time on our honeymoon, and returned the following week. I dreaded having to get back to work after having a relaxing week, but I knew I had no choice.

I arrived at the shop on Monday morning and to my surprise, Jake was there behind the counter along with some guy I had never seen before in my life. I went into the back and asked Jake to come back for a second. He made his way to the back room rather quickly. “Hey Man! How was the honeymoon?” He said cheerfully.

“It was good, thanks. So, who is that out front?” I asked.

“Oh Yeah! That’s Tim. He is the new guy.” Jake explained. He went on to tell me about how he was on a house call this last week and had a tire blow out going down the road. This guy, Tim, stopped to help him and apparently, Tim had just graduated from the university with a degree in Computer Science.

He went on to say that they hung out the next couple of evenings at the bar down the street, and found out that Tim was looking for a job to hold him over until he moved out West to start an internship somewhere in Silicon Valley next year.

I can’t say that I was thrilled that Jake had hired some guy that I had never met, but if he thought that Tim was qualified, I wasn’t going to get pissed about it. We did need some help after all. I went back up front and talked with Tim for a about an hour, and while he did seem very knowledgeable, something about him made me uneasy. Since Tim wasn’t planning on staying with us for the long haul, we didn’t bother getting him certified and cleared to work at the government sites. He could stick to other businesses and consumer customers.

We had an upstairs section to our shop that we never used. It was sealed off via a large wooden door because we didn’t want to waste money heating/cooling it since we weren’t using it. Jake and I had talked about turning it into an apartment and possibly living up there back before I had gotten married, but had since given up on that idea.

We had started occasionally storing old boxes up there in case we needed to ship an entire system at some point. There were also two huge deep freezers up there in what used to be a kitchen area. We knew they both worked because we had tried to sell them once before for extra money, and to get rid of them. But since no one ever wanted to fool with dragging them down the stairs, we unplugged them, and they just sat up there.

I even tried to convince Jake that we could clean up the upstairs and make it into a man cave with a nice LED TV/Sound System and a pool table, but he never seemed interested because we were always so busy. I had a plan to revisit this conversation after Tim had been with us a while and the workload was under control. Tim added in his two cents explaining how expensive it would be to renovate the upstairs, and to heat/cool it. I really wanted to blurt out, “Who the hell even asked you?” But somehow, I remained civil.

The next several weeks seemed to go by quickly. I didn’t see a lot of Tim because he spent most of his time out on the road helping Jake or picking up the slack by handling other onsite appointments. This was fine with me because I can't say that I liked Tim very much, and I swear I would sometimes catch him staring at me all creepily on occasion.

Other than that, things seemed to be working out okay for the most part, but I still felt uneasy around Tim when he would spend time at the shop. I really couldn’t even tell you why. He dressed well, and seemed smart. Still, there would just be those times when the hairs on the back of my neck would stand up when he was there. I would like to be able to say that eventually that feeling went away. Unfortunately, it did not.

In fact, it only got worse over the next several weeks. Shortly after Tim started, Jake had given him a key so he could come in on weekends and work on systems in the shop as needed. I tried my best to not be there alone with him whenever possible.

Yuck! For the past week there has been a faint smell of something akin to a skunk that had crawled up under the building and died. It wasn’t too bad at first, but was getting increasingly worse. I made a reminder in my calendar to call pest control to check for dead rodents under the building. The last thing I needed was customers getting grossed out and not wanting to come into the store because it reeked.

The next evening, after the shop had closed, I was alone in the back trying to catch up on some work when the phone rang. Now, I usually don’t answer the phone after hours because if it is important, they can leave a message and we will get back to them. On top of that, all of our government contracts have a special cell number they can use to reach Jake in case he needs to make an emergency on call visit.

However, I recognized the number on the Caller ID as Mr./Mrs. Phillips. Tim had been scheduled go out there earlier that afternoon to check out a possible malware issue. So, I decided to answer. “PCS, how may I help you?” I was met with an angry male voice.

“I want to speak to the owner!” He said angrily. “Listen. Y’all were supposed to come out here and fix this damned computer today, and it’s still just as slow and unusable as it was this morning.” On top of that, the webcam light won’t turn off either.” He added.

I went into full damage control mode, and apologized profusely over and over for the inconvenience. “I see that Tim was supposed to come out there today at 2:30 p.m. today. Do you know how long he was there this afternoon?” I inquired.

“Hold on. I’ve been at work all day, let me ask my wife…. No wonder the damned computer doesn’t work. She said that nobody came out at all to fix this piece of crap.” Said the man, now completely irate. “Again, Mr. Phillips, I am so very sorry for the inconvenience. I can’t imagine what happened to Tim today that made him miss the appointment. I will reschedule a call to your house for tomorrow, and the labor will be on us for your inconvenience.” I said, trying to save a customer.

The thought of a free service call must have done the trick. His tone changed, and he seemed much more cordial. I penciled him in for 2:30 p.m. the following day and hung up the phone to continue my work.

I was quite annoyed that Tim had missed his appointment and didn’t even bother to call the customer or me to let either of us know what was going on. The more I thought about it the more pissed off I got. I couldn’t take it anymore! I grabbed the phone and tried to call Tim’s cell. Right to voicemail. I left a message asking what happened, and if he was okay since I hadn’t heard from him. I then hung up the phone, and called Jake.


 * Ring, Ring, Ring, Ring,*** “Your call had been forwarded to an automated voice messaging system. The person you are trying to reach is not available. After the tone, please leave your name and number.” “Dammit! Why does anyone even have cell phones if they don’t know how to answer them?!” I shouted.

About that time the shop phone rang again. I answered it quickly without looking at the Caller ID thinking it might be Jake or Tim. “Hey this is Harry up here at the 911 Dispatch Center. We cannot get any of our system to print to our main laser printer, and it’s causing us to get backed up. We tried to get a hold of Jake on the cell, but all we get is voicemail.”

“Hi Harry.” I replied. “This is Will. I am just here catching up on some work at the shop. I haven’t been able to reach Jake either. I am sorry to hear about the printing issues you are having, and I would be glad to drive up there and take a look if that’s okay.”

“Yes please.” He said in a panic. I told him to give me 15 minutes and I’d be right there.

I locked up, got in my truck, and headed up toward the 911 Dispatch Center. My mind wandered back and forth between Tim going AWOL and Jake not answering the cell. He never misses a call from anyone. Especially the 911 center. I arrived at the dispatch center and scanned my badge to open the gate. After parking, I again scanned my badge to enter the building.

I went back to Harry’s office to let him know I was there. He greeted me, and came out to show me what was going on. Sure enough, none of the print jobs were completing. The print queue was pretty backed up, and it was a mess. I checked a couple of the workstations, and they all had prints queued up. Odds of the workstations all failing at once was pretty astronomical, so I checked the network.

The switches all looked good so I moved on to the printer itself. I kneeled down and noticed that there was no link light on the Ethernet port. I disconnected the RJ45 connector and looked it over. One of the twisted pairs inside had broken and the end wasn’t clamped on very well. There was a pile of cable that had been curled up behind the printer that wasn’t even the right color.

Someone had replaced the original patch cable with this monstrosity. No wonder nothing was printing. I went to the back and measured out about 5 feet of Cat5e cable, and put new ends on. I plugged it into the wall jack, and then into the printer. Voilà! The printer fired up, and out started to pour all of the prints.

I told Harry that I would wait here until they finished to make sure they completed successfully, and then bring them back to his desk. The printing went on for what seemed like forever, even though it was more like 10 minutes. I gathered up all of the papers and started heading back to Harry’s office. As I walked into Harry’s office, I started to show him that they all turned out okay by filing through them a bit. “They all look okay to me.” I said proudly. “I don’t see any banding or smudging in the pri……….” My heart sank and those hairs on my neck stood on end.

I grabbed the 4th paper from the top and threw the rest on the desk. The printouts were mugshots being transmitted to the 911 Dispatch Center to add to their local database. They print them out as well to add alphabetically to folders they keep within reach for the dispatchers to check when assisting police.

“No...no… no…. This can’t be happening.” I uttered in disbelief! I rubbed my eyes and looked again, but there was no denying it. There was “Tim.” His name wasn’t even Tim. It was Robert, and he was wanted for the murder of his entire family. The report stated that while they slept, he had crept into his brother’s room and slit his throat. He then took his father’s shotgun and shot his mother and father in bed.

“Oh, Please No!” I screamed. “Harry! Jake hired this guy a few weeks ago to help us at the shop. He said his name was Tim. I haven’t been able to get a hold of him or Jake today.”

We ran outside and jumped into Harry’s state car. As we headed back into town, Harry radioed for police assistance. We went to Jake’s house. His car was there, but no one answered when we knocked. We waited for the police to arrive. They knocked the door down and did a sweep of his house. No one was there.

I called Jake’s mom and let her know what was happening, and asked if she had heard from him. She hadn’t heard from him in a few days she said. We all went back over to the shop, and I told the police everything I knew about Tim, and how long he had worked for us. I explained the story of how Jake hired him while I was on my honeymoon, and I really didn’t know anything about him.

One of the officers kept sniffing around and making faces. I apologized for the odor and told him that I thought an animal had died under the building, and that I had called pest control to check it out for me, but they hadn’t made it out yet. He nodded, and went back out to the main showroom.

I stayed in the back talking to Harry and the other police officers about what was going on. We heard a knock on the back door. It was Jake's mom, and needless to say, she was freaking out. Just as she came in and sat down we heard one of the officers yell out. “Jesus Christ!” We ran out of the office in time to see him burst from upstairs in a panic. He ran to the nearest trash can and threw up. Some of the officers ran upstairs with guns drawn, and I followed behind them.

The stench was too much, and it got worse the further up you went. At the top, it was all you could do not to throw up. The two freezers were open, and even though it was dark, the flash lights illuminated parts of the floor and the white freezers. There was blood everywhere. The freezers were full of different body parts. Arms, legs, heads, and other assorted body parts.

On the counter was a small hot plate with a skillet, a knife, a fork, and a stack of paper plates. In the corner was a small sleeping bag along with an old duffel sack with some clothes in it.

This sick bastard had been killing random people and bringing their body parts to the shop to hide in the freezers upstairs. To make things worse, he was cooking and eating the body parts at night after everyone was gone. By the looks of it, he had been squatting up there since he got a key to the place. They never did fully identify all of the bodies. I was told later by Harry that they knew the parts were from at least six different people.

Thankfully, Jake was not one of the bodies that had been stored in the freezers. The next day I got a call from him and as it turns out his girlfriend had slept over the night earlier, and she had gotten a call that her mother had a mild heart attack. So, her and Jake took her car and drove last minute all the way to the next state over so they could be with her.

I explained everything that happened to him, and what was found by the police. Needless to say, we were both questioned heavily. Jake was never the same after that. I sold him my half of the business and moved with my wife to the Southern part of the state so she could be closer to her family. But it wasn't long before I heard that the business went under.

Jake slowly started to lose the will to keep it going. He got married, then divorced. Then remarried, and eventually had some kids. Shortly after they were born he and his wife just up and moved to India to do mission work for his church.

We don't really talk anymore. He doesn't use Facebook, and I don't even have his phone number. I see random Posts from his mom and sister with updates on how he is occasionally, but that's it. I will always be grateful to Jake for teaching me about computers and I'm so glad we both survived that incredible ordeal.

To my knowledge, Tim/Robert was never apprehended by the police. We never heard from or saw him again. I do think about him from time to time. And wherever he is out there, if he ever again tries to eat someone, I sincerely hope that sick bastard chokes on their middle finger! 