“Oh, nothing to do with work.”
His silence encouraged her to continue.
“Things are pretty bad on the money front. My husband got into some investments a few years ago, and they've gone very badly.”
“How badly?”
“It's 'lost everything to the blood sucking bank' badly.”
Madhu had never told anyone at work what had happened to her husband's investments, and their subsequent fight to save their home. But Peter could be trusted to keep a confidence, even if he was a little intense sometimes.
“Are you serious? What happened?”
“Don't want to bore you with the details of his stupidity, really. We'll be fine, eventually.”
“Which bank was it, by the way?”
“National Civic. There are a bunch of us in the same situation, we're thinking about starting a class action against them.” Madhu instantly regretted divulging any real information to Peter, and braced herself for one of his conspiracy theory diatribes.
“They're all the same, I guess. Hope everything works out OK, yeh? Better get back to work.” Peter grabbed his empty takeaway food container and left the lunch area in the direction of his workstation.
Madhu was relieved not to have received a lecture. She liked working for Peter – he was the smartest guy in the building, always pulled his weight and helped everyone else do the same. Outside the work context, though, he was a little strange, and sometimes after a lunchtime discussion she wondered how he came to some of his weird conclusions about the world and how it worked.
She grabbed the container she'd brought in with food from home, rinsed it out, and returned to her workstation. With another deadline looming, there was plenty to get on with. Peter, on the other hand, always had a little time to squeeze something interesting in after lunch, like researching class actions against major banks.
* * *
It shouldn't be so hard to arrange things so your patients don't sit in waiting rooms for hours getting anxious, but then, why would a psychiatrist think of that? Peter was waiting, but doing his breathing exercises to help reduce his rising anxiety.
The pile of magazines in this waiting room was better than others he'd been in, so he chose one at random from the middle of the pile. He closed his eyes and imagined what it might be. Something bright and breezy, about living in the country, that sort of thing.
He opened his eyes and slumped. A business magazine. He was just about to cheat himself in magazine lotto and swap for something else when he read the cover. “How National Civic Weathered the Storm. Exclusive Interview with CEO Murray Swan.”
Peter closed his eyes and imagined what that looked like. He saw the vivid image of the National Civic Bank logo jumping up and down on a thousand tiny faces –and he saw Madhu's face come and go among the throng a few times. The pillar of the thousand tiny faces held the logo up above a dark storm cloud.
The sound of another patient entering the room broke the spell the image had on him. The calm aura he had put on had vanished, and he was breathing quickly and sweating buckets. Lucid enough to know he didn't want to see the shrink in this state, he calmly took the magazine, and slipped out the door while the pompous door-bitch behind the counter was looking for a patient file or something.
The tranquil pastels of the waiting room gave way to the bright light of the afternoon, and the harsh edges of the glass and concrete of the city. The slightly glossy print of the cover of the magazine was slowly sticking to Peter's sweaty left hand as he walked purposefully through the thinning early afternoon crowd.
He finally found somewhere cool and shady to sit down, and read the whole article.
National Civic Bank Weathers the Storm
National Civic Bank (NCB) stands head and shoulders above the other banks in the region in the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis (GFC). While NCB's performance in the period 2005-2007 was below its competitors, it's now clear that NCB was sticking to banking basics, and keeping its eye on risk management. Led by the reclusive Murray Swan, the NCB team are now the darlings of the finance sector.
Not only that, NCB is also on top of the customer satisfaction rating league tables.
In this exclusive interview, we talk to Murray Swan about how he and his team have wowed the market and their customers through the most challenging conditions banks have experienced in decades.
Peter read the whole article twice. How could this guy be a hero when his bank was throwing people out of their homes? He sat there shaking for a few minutes.
* * *
“Mr O'Leary?” The receptionist looked at the faces in the waiting room. She was sure he had checked in, but now there was only a slight indentation in the chair that had just moments ago held O'Leary, P. She called him again, but there was nowhere for him to be, if not waiting just there. She checked the list, and called the next patient in with the same tired resignation she always did, at least when her boss wasn't within earshot. She went in with the patient and let the doctor know that Mr O'Leary hadn't shown up for his appointment. She thought nothing of the fact that this wasn't what had actually happened, but the effect on the doctor was the same – one less patient, and half an hour gained in the afternoon's schedule that was already an hour behind.
Dr Patterson lifted the O'Leary P. file from his desk, opened it briefly, then snapped it shut.
“Please contact Mr O'Leary for a reschedule as soon as possible.” He put the file in the OUT tray, picked up the next file and gave his undivided attention to the next patient.
The receptionist went back to the desk with a fed-up look on her face. Her life would be much simpler without people like Mr O'Leary. She'd write a note for herself on a little sticky note, and put it on her desk. She'd ring Mr O'Leary in her own good time. Tomorrow, maybe.
The phone rang, and the name O'Leary P. didn't enter her head again. Likewise, she didn't notice that the pile of magazines was one lower than it had been before.
* * *
“Excuse me, Madhu, do you know where Peter is?”
Madhu had been immersed in a complex bug-fix since lunch, and hadn't noticed that Peter wasn't around.
“Sorry, Brian, I haven't seen him since before lunch. He went off to a medical appointment at 12, I think.” Madhu wasn't worried about Peter or how Brian would feel about him being AWOL for a while. She and Brian both knew Peter would have been able to solve the bug Madhu was working on by now, but then again, he fixed ten of them yesterday.
“I just want to catch up with him on the project plan. I'll leave him a note, but if you see him . . .”
“Sure.” Madhu immediately wrote herself a sticky note and attached it to the side of her monitor, and she zoned back into her problem. The afternoon marched on, and not even her brief chocolate gathering mission distracted her from the job at hand. The code yielded it's secrets about 4, then it was cleaning up, documenting and retesting.
It wasn't until about 5 that she actually sat back and noticed that Peter's workstation was still empty. It was possible he'd been in, and she'd been so fixated on her work that she'd missed him. A quick check of his desk showed Brian's note untouched.
“Alright for some,” she thought out of admiration as much as anything else. Some of the team were settling in for a few more hours, others had had enough and were on the move. Madhu grabbed her bag and phone and ran for the lift. Thursday was not the night for long hours.
* * *
Peter had left the city a couple of hours earlier. He reread the article about NCB several more times on the train. There were a few insightful observations by the journalist, but this was the sort of article that really stank of being a paid advertorial. The portrayal of CEO Murray Swan seemed to define him by who he wasn't, rather than who he was. Swan was always deflecting praise and talking about others, and shying away from anything personal. His comments about customers who were “in difficulty”, people like Madhu and her husband, were patronising and non-committal.
/> Rather than taking the direct route home, Peter took his “thinking path” through a local parkland. The track plunged away from the road into a small piece of remnant forest, and in five minutes you could be anywhere but the middle of suburbia. Peter loved walking this route when he had a problem to solve. The rhythm of his feet striding along, the crunch of his work shoes on gravel and paving, the silence hanging in the trees.
After two circuits he had thought through the information that had been thrown at him today. Peter's conclusion was that National Civic Bank needed to be subjected to more scrutiny about why it was crushing people like Madhu than that fawning article had managed. He also concluded that Murray Swan was not enigmatic, but that he had something to hide.
With a plan formed in his mind, he emerged from the park and headed for the local shops to pick up the fuel he needed for the night ahead.
At first glance, Peter's flat was pretty much par for the course for a single thirty-something professional male. The main room was dominated by an enormous TV screen, and this was partnered by “the chair”, a sumptuous leather recliner whose purpose in life was to keep a pair of eyes aimed at the screen in total comfort. The walls were lined with bookcases, half of which were quite stylish and matched the rest of the décor, while the other half jarred with their randomly coloured sagging timber. They all contained DVDs, mostly boxed sets of TV shows – The Wire, West Wing, CSI (all varieties), The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, Burn Notice, Star Trek.
The fridge was pretty empty apart from a series of plastic tubs containing leftovers that had grown into science experiments, and a few beers. The two six packs of guarana and caffeine drink slotted in easily, and he took out one can, put it in the freezer and set the oven timer for 20 minutes. He slammed the fridge door shut armed with a handful of chocolate, and ate it dispassionately as he headed into the bathroom for a shower.
The timer was going as Peter returned to the kitchen, now with clean but dishevelled hair, and wearing a t-shirt and tracksuit pants. He silenced the timer and savoured the sound of the now cold can opening, and drank as he went down the hall.
There were three monitor screens set up in an angular semi-circle around the monster sized desk in his spare room – not much else could fit in there. Under the desk were a bank of computers huddled amongst a nest of cables and power boards. The only sound accompanying the blinking of little blue and yellow lights was the whir of cooling fans – he preferred to work in silence.
He grabbed everything that was either on his desk or stuck up on the wall and roughly folded it into a large ball, and put it in the corner of the room with other similar piles. There were generations of little bits of poster putty on the wall, some with tiny wisps of paper still attached. He took a photo of the dense scribble on the whiteboard, then cleaned it meticulously until it was pristine.
The leather chair gave out a gentle whoosh as Peter sat in it and commenced work. The screens flickered as his hands danced like angry spiders across the two keyboards he was using, stopping every now and again for a thoughtful swig from the can.
Soon, the printer was clunking out sheets of information, and after an hour the room was starting to look like one of those set-ups you see in procedural crime shows. The shows that Peter liked to watch the most.
It was simple to set up some fake accounts to join NCB's Facebook and LinkedIN networks, to get access to the names of people who worked there – information that might come in handy later.
By 8pm Peter had assembled a solid picture of NCB. The information was sorted, stuck on the wall, and most importantly, completely understood and remembered. The white board had a few diagrams and a list of issues and unanswered questions.
All the information he'd found about Murray Swan had its own wall. Getting a complete picture of someone with his kind of public profile wasn't that hard with so much material in the public domain, and while cracking bank security was out of his league, home networks were usually pretty straightforward. He had access to what he needed.
He knew it was still too early to catch up with his online buddies, and he needed their help to get further into the bank, so he took a break, ordered a pizza online, and sat watching the website describe where his pizza was up to until he heard the buzzer from downstairs.
After the silence of the last few hours Peter needed the company of the TV, so he ate his pizza in front a repeat of a show he already owned on DVD. The slices disappeared slowly, punctuated by swigs from a beer. When he'd had enough, Peter stayed in his zombie like rest state for a while, into the next show, which he had no real interest in.
It was ten when a news break broke the spell the flickering images had on him. He grabbed the pizza box and empty beer can and took it into the kitchen, then returned to his study with a fresh can of energy drink and a whole block of chocolate.
It was time to head into the dark places to get more of what he needed. He stepped through a three stage security system to get to his favourite forum. A quick glance down the current user list brought a smile to his face.
Polly:
Dexter:
Polly:
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