“Neither of us were really into it, you know? Everyone else paired off and there we were. We just sat and talked and he was saying how beautiful I was and I decided might as well show him a little pussy. So I did. And then I thought, well why not let him have a little taste. So I did. He actually knew what he was doing. Then he wanted to fuck me but I told him only my boyfriend could fuck my pussy.”
“Why?”
“Oh I don’t know. That was Brad’s rule at one point before the two of them just declared open season this week. I think his wife has something going on too.”
“Oh. Think they’re going to split?”
“No. I think they’ll have a nice makeup session like you and Harry did and get on with their lives. Anyway then I rolled over to see if he could figure out the loophole.”
“Oh no. You’ve been around Brad too much.”
“Tell me about it. Here I thought I was corrupting him. Well, he did, but I told him he had to use his tongue first.”
“And he did?”
“I don’t think it was a novelty for him.”
“Maybe not. You know what Harry told me? That Carla told him she’d been doing this stuff since she was nine. That she had run away from home at thirteen and lived as a hooker. Then wound up in jail.”
“Wow.”
“So are you going back to the lake today?”
“Yep. Coming with us?”
“I don’t know. When I told Harry I was going yesterday he said I needed to work it out of my system. Then I told Brad that and he said maybe we needed a couple more treatments.”
“He said that?”
“So I’ve been thinking how it would be fun to do the hands by your side thing with him. Think he’d like that? I mean, if you wouldn’t mind?”
“I just want to swim this afternoon. I’m doing this stupid movie tonight.”
“Oh. Forgot about that. You’re going through with it?”
“Guess so. I was all hep on it Tuesday. Now I’m not so sure. Ever do that?”
“Once. A long time ago.”
“When you did it with Sam?”
“Same time period. I was sort of a slut in those days. It was this big college orgy thing. I think I only show up in it for about ten seconds.”
“Oh. What was it like?”
“It was a lot of fun. But I was like twenty. Not even.”
“I can’t imagine how beautiful you must have been.”
“Yeah, everyone wanted a piece of me. And I gave it to them. Well, that was a long time ago. What are you doing for this flick?”
“I think it’s just me and a couple of guys. Not sure though. Guess I’ll find out when the time comes. What are we doing today?”
“More on those data classes. We’ve got a few existing data sources to work with. Mostly old stuff, IMS. Want to know how to integrate them.”
“Okay. Brad gave me some notes, but we may need to get him in to help.”
They went up to the same conference room as the day before with the same people in it. “Good morning.” This time it was easier for Ann to get them to shut up. Had Harry been gossiping about their night at the volleyball place? Apparently not. “Today we’re going to talk about how to use your existing data. I’ve got to tell you, Atlanta has written everything so far on the assumption there’s a nice clean relational database with all the data. And all the customers are telling them it’s not really that way. The next thing our group is doing is the internal version. So we need to figure this out too. So here goes.”
Ann put up a foil. “Now the way we’ve been thinking of it is that you have a data base table and a data class. The fields in the table correspond to the attributes of the class. But why does it have to be that way? Brad already has implemented the idea of related and computed fields. For example, an order line might include the customer name from the order. Or the price computed from the unit price and the quantity. But what if you wanted to get data from several different places? To instantiate the class, you need some sort of identity information. For example, the order number and line number or part number depending on how you have the keys set up. But suppose your order isn’t sitting in the new database at all? Suppose it’s sitting over in IMS somewhere?”
“Yeah, just suppose.” That from Ned drew a wry chuckle from the others.
“Well one solution is to do a mass migration over to the new database. And there are reasons to do that.”
“And a lot of reasons not to, honey.”
“That’s why we’re having this talk. So step one would be to set your data class up to look at the IMS database to get the data. But how? How do we get our stuff to do that? Well what we would need would be some sort of handler class that knows how to serve up data from IMS. So what would that look like? Any clues?”
“Some connection to IMS. And some methods to do the retrievals.”
“Good guess. But there’s another piece to it. If you look way way down in our system, you find classes that are just wrappers for C code. Any of you ever code in C? Well this is what a C class to do IMS stuff would look like.” She put up another foil.
“So the idea would be, you get the C code working. Then get the wrapper working. Then build data classes that use it. And no, we haven’t done it yet.”
“Think we can get this going in time to do us any good?”
“Why don’t we give it a crack today and see how far we get?”
Which was not all that far. Even getting the C sample class to do anything was driving Ned and Harry crazy. Along with the ladies. The four of them were staring at Ned’s terminal in frustration when Brad came.
“You guys doing lunch?”
“I guess.” Ned gave a sigh.
“Smokey Joe’s?”
“Whatever.”
Today pulled pork was the featured item. But even that was not enough to cheer them up.
“Why the long faces?”
“Fucking C. You ever do any work with IMS?”
“Lots. In PL1.”
“Us too. Our test box with IMS doesn’t have a C environment on it. Ever set one up?”
“Nope.”
“We need Jake,” Katie said. “He got all that stuff going with DB2 in Atlanta.”
“You’re going to get Jake out here?” That was enough to make Ann choke on her iced tea. “Seriously?”
“Depends on how badly we need him.” Katie was giving Harry a look. “I’d have to, like, move back into the hotel. Just for the week.”
“How about Al?” Ann said. “If we could get him to come out?”
“If.”
“I assume,” Harry said, “you would have a way of convincing Jake to come out?”
“We’d have to talk about it.”
But Katie wound up riding back with Brad and Ann.
“My first year of grad school,” Brad said, “my college girl friend broke up with me. Actually she had at the end of my senior year, but then I went out to see her in California and everything was lovey dovey again. Then as soon as school started, it was over. Except a few weeks later she gave me a call. She had a job doing poll reporting, and she wanted me to come along for protection.”
“I think I know where this is going,” Katie said. “It’s none of your fucking business. Look, what did we do at the lake yesterday? And you said you wanted more and I’m going to come over this afternoon and give you more. If you want me to.”
“I do.”
“So why the fuck is this any different? Fucking Harry does not fucking own me. We’re not married. We’re not even engaged. Did he say anything last night? No, he couldn’t wait to get his hands, more than his hands, on that little girl. So why the fuck is it such a big fucking deal?”