Jamie Brodie 01 - Cited to Death

is Oxford.”
    “Excellent. If you have trouble getting them to send it, let me know and I’ll rattle some cages.”
    “Ha ha.” Karen did some more typing and clicking, then sat back. “Ta-da! Your ILL request is on its way. You know this will take a while.”
    “Yes, I know. Will they send it electronically?”
    “Probably. Either way, it will come right to you.”
    “Okey dokey.” I stood up. “Ms. Lewis, you rock. A thousand thank yous.”
    “Heh.” Karen stood up as well. “You owe me one. And don’t be a stranger! We need a little more humanity around this place.”
    After I left the biomedical library, I had a meeting to attend. I was on a curriculum development committee for the library school, which was quartered in the building next to the research library. I sat through the meeting, but my mind wasn't fully on it. I was anxious to take a look at the article burning a hole in my bag.
    When I got back to my office, my monitor screen was blank. That was weird; it wasn't set up to go into power saver mode like that. I jiggled the mouse, expecting my desktop layout to reappear. It didn't. I looked at the power indicator; the light on the start button was off. I turned the computer back on and waited. Instead of the usual booting up sequence, I saw the thing feared by computer users everywhere: The dreaded blue screen of death. My hard drive had crashed. Shit .
    I called IT and left my information on their automated system. The recorded voice assured me that someone would be in touch to address my problem in a timely manner. I hung up and considered my options. I only had about 15 minutes until I was due on the reference desk, so it didn't make much sense to commandeer someone else's computer, or get my laptop fired up in that amount of time. I stashed my laptop in my filing cabinet, locked it up behind me, hit the coffee shop for a little pick me up, then headed for reference.
    At 1:30, Clinton walked up to the desk.
    “Hi, Clinton.”
    “The word for the day is spruik .” He bowed and walked away.
    Liz looked it up. “To make or give a speech, especially extensively.”
    I laughed. “Well, we don’t have to worry about that from Clinton.”
    I checked my email one more time before I left the reference computer at 3:00 and saw an email from Karen Lewis.
    Hi Jamie,
    Just wanted to let you know I got an acknowledgement of your request. The article should arrive next week. Much more quickly than I expected.
    FYI, I just had a visit from one of the authors of the article I printed for you. The first author, as I remember – a Dr. Oliver. He was interested in whoever it was that wanted his article. Apparently he has an alert set up to ping him every time the article is downloaded. Can you imagine? I think he believed that one of our docs was going to use his procedure, the way he acted at first, but when he found out it was someone else he relaxed and became quite charming. I gave him your name, but he truly didn’t seem interested once I told him it wasn’t a medical person.
    Cheers,
    Karen
    Shit . I wish she hadn’t mentioned my name. But it didn’t occur to me to tell her not to because it didn’t occur to me that anyone connected to the articles would find out. So the guy had set it up to receive an alert every time someone accessed his article. I didn’t even know that was possible. Either he was really paranoid about having his work copied, or he had a huge ego and the alert was just a way to stroke it.
    When I got back to my office, IT hadn’t arrived yet, and my desktop PC was still dead. The top of my desk was clear after yesterday’s cleaning binge, so I pushed the PC to the far side and got my laptop set up. My third goal for the day was to finish work on a budget presentation that I was scheduled to give on Friday. I’d worked on it at home while I was recovering, so it was nearly complete. It just needed a few finishing touches. I kept all my works-in-progress in Dropbox so that I could access them from anywhere. The death of my PC was annoying but not a disaster because there was very little saved on its hard drive. All of my important files were in various clouds.
    I finished up the PowerPoint slides I wanted to use and was in the process of transferring them to Prezi when there was a knock on the door. I looked up and saw a stranger. Silver hair, patrician features, expensive tailored suit, very expensive shoes. He smiled and held out his hand. "Dr. Brodie? I'm Tristan