Last Whiteboard

I was thirty-seven years old, three years out of my divorce, and sitting in the IT wing of St. Jude's Medical Centre at ten minutes past ten on a Tuesday night, thinking about kissing a woman I had never once kissed in six months of working overnight shifts with her. Her name is Fern Diaz, she's thirty-four, she does frontend, and she has this habit of tapping her pen twice against her teeth before she disagrees with me, which should be annoying and instead is the thing I think about when I'm supposed to be watching error logs. The wing is a converted storage floor, all glass walls looking down on a downtown that goes dark around eleven, and the only light in the place comes from the monitors, the city grid below, and one whiteboard Logan refuses to throw away even though half the markers are dead.

My ex-wife used to say I noticed the wrong details about people, and maybe she was right, because I could tell you that Fern drinks her coffee with the creamer poured first so it doesn't need stirring, and I could not tell you what her actual job title was before she came here. We bicker about APIs the way other people flirt, or maybe the way other people fight, I've honestly lost the ability to tell the difference. Six months of that. There was one night in the breakroom, back in March sometime, I don't remember the exact date, when she said something funny and I laughed and we just looked at each other for about two seconds longer than coworkers look at each other, and then Jaime Hansen banged through the door with a clipboard and the moment died right there on the lino.

So that's where my head was when Logan Blackwell came out of his office at 10:40 with his reading glasses pushed up on his forehead and a printout in his hand, which is very Logan, because the bug was in the ticketing system and the ticketing system has a perfectly good interface, but Logan trusts paper the way some men trust dogs.

"Production bug," he said. "Scheduling module. Night shift rounds are showing the wrong patient rooms after midnight."

I pulled my headphones off. "Define wrong."

"Off by one ward. Patients on four showing on five, five on six, so on and so forth." He dropped the printout on my desk. "It's a rounding boundary problem, I'd bet my truck on it. Nobody goes home until it's fixed and verified, so plan on three a.m. at the earliest."

Fern spun her chair around from her station, which is two desks down from mine and has been two desks down for six months, and said, "It's not rounding, it's the timezone offset, I told you about that three sprints ago."

"You told me about daylight saving," Logan said.

"Which is a timezone offset, Logan." She tapped her pen twice against her teeth. "I'll bet my Corolla on it."

Logan had just bet his truck, and I think she knew that, and I think that's why she said it. He grunted and went back to his office, and about ninety seconds later we heard his chair recline, because Logan is forty-two, he's been running this wing for nine years, and he has mastered the art of napping upright with his eyes supposedly on the ticket queue.

Jaime came by at eleven with the coffee cart, because Jaime is twenty-eight, she's our nurse liaison, and part of her actual paid job is keeping a dozen developers from wandering onto the ward floor and part of her unpaid job is mothering all of us. She set a cup by my keyboard without being asked, which means she likes me, and set one by Fern, which means nothing because Jaime likes everyone.

"Staff meeting notes," she said. "Do not go near the meds fridge on four, the pharmacy audit is Wednesday and if a single yogurt of mine goes missing during the audit window I will be blaming IT as a category."

"We've never touched your yogurt," Fern said.

"Adam from infrastructure touched my yogurt in April and I have a long memory." Jaime looked at the printout on my desk and made a face. "Scheduling module again? That thing's been cursed since before I got here."

"It's not cursed," I said. "It's just old."

"Old and cursed, Milo, are often the same thing in a hospital." She pointed her pen at both of us. "Fix it before rounds at five or Dr. Archer will come down here personally and she does not do nice."

She left, and the floor settled into that overnight hum, the building breathing through its vents, monitors ticking over, the city below us mostly dark except for the hospital's own glow reflecting off the glass. Fern rolled her chair over to my desk, which she does sometimes and which I have thought about more than I'd admit to anyone, and looked at the stack trace on my screen.

"Okay," she said. "Show me where midnight happens."

I pulled up the scheduler and there it was, a date boundary function written by a man named Dale who left the hospital in 2019, and the function did something with local time and something else with UTC and both of those things were wrong in ways that canceled out during the day and fell apart after midnight. Fern stood up and grabbed the marker that still had ink, the blue one, and went to the whiteboard.

"Come here," she said. "You explain the data flow better than you write it, it's very annoying."

So I went to the whiteboard, and this is the part where I have to confess that standing next to her at a whiteboard at eleven at night did things to my concentration that no stack trace should be allowed to cause. She smells like that cedar deodorant from the co-op downtown, and she draws arrows with these little loops on the tails, and she was standing close enough that when she leaned in to write I could feel warmth off her shoulder.

"Ward is stored as an integer," she said, drawing a box. "Rounds job runs at midnight local. Where does it get local?"

"From the server, which is UTC."

"Uh huh. And where does the patient's ward assignment get stamped?"

"Admission system. Local time." I watched her write the two timestamps side by side, and then I saw it, the off-by-one, the ward number getting recomputed from a stale row because the boundary check compared the wrong clock. "Oh. Oh, that's stupid."

"That's stupid," she agreed, and she was grinning, and I was looking at her grin instead of the board. "Fix the comparison and the whole cascade falls out. One line. I want you to appreciate that I told you the offset thing three sprints ago."

"You told me about daylight saving."

"Which is the same category of crime, Milo." She reached up to write the fix under my arrow, and I reached to take the marker from her, because she'd been writing for ten minutes and it seemed polite, and our fingers ended up on the marker at the same time, her hand over mine, and neither of us moved for what was probably one second and felt like a commercial break.

"We could just," she started, and stopped.

"Could just what," I said, and my voice came out lower than I meant it to.

She looked at the board, and then at me, and the two seconds from the breakroom in March came back all at once, except now there was no clipboard coming through any door. "We could fix the line first," she said. "And then talk about the other thing."

"There's an other thing?"

"Milo." She tapped the marker against my hand, still on hers. "Come on. You know there's an other thing."

I did know. I had known since March, possibly since the API argument in January, possibly longer than that if I'm being truthful with myself, which is rare. Logan's chair creaked in his office and we both stepped back from the marker like a pair of shoplifters, and she laughed, a short real laugh, and went back to writing the fix while I stood there feeling like the floor had tilted a few degrees.

I sat down at my terminal and typed the corrected comparison with hands that were not entirely steady, and Fern came and stood behind my chair to watch it compile, one hand resting on the back of my chair, not on me, but near enough that I could have reached up and touched her wrist if I'd had any courage, which apparently I was saving for later.

The fix went into the test environment at half past midnight, and the scheduler job ran against a simulated date roll and came out clean, the ward numbers staying put, and Logan was asleep in his office with his tie over one shoulder of the chair, so there was nobody around to see it but us and the hum of the vents. Fern wrote FIX VERIFIED on the whiteboard in the blue marker and put a checkmark next to it, and then she stood there looking at the checkmark like it owed her money, and I sat there looking at her, which is what I've been doing for six months, so no change there really.

"Logan's going to want to see this before he wakes up," she said, capping the marker. "He'll want to redeploy the whole module tonight. He'll say the word 'window' about nine times."

"He'll also want to rewrite the function from scratch because it was Dale's and he's had a grudge against Dale's code since before I got here."

"Dale's code is a crime scene. But yeah." She rolled her chair back toward her desk and then stopped halfway, parked between our two desks, which is a spot she takes when she wants to talk instead of work, and I know that because it's happened maybe four times in six months and I have a whole mental catalog about it that I'm not proud of. She spun the pen in her fingers and didn't put it against her teeth, which means she's not disagreeing, she's deciding something. "Can I ask you a question that's none of my business?"

"Those are usually the best ones."

"Why do you never date anybody from the night shift?"

Let me clarify that I had about four seconds to answer that, and that in those four seconds I considered lying, and then considered that lying to a frontend developer overnight is a bad strategy because they debug everything for a living. "Because I've been curious about one person on the night shift," I said. "And dating anyone else seemed like a way to mess that up."

She looked at me, and the monitor light was doing that thing it does, half blue, and she said, "Me specifically, or are you just being polite?"

"You. Specifically. Since roughly the API argument in January, and if I'm being honest probably the week before that too, when you fixed my broken ticket template without being asked."

"That was a Tuesday. You brought me a muffin the next morning."

"I remember the muffin."

"Blueberry. I thought that was just politeness."

"It was a muffin with intent, Fern."

She laughed, the short real laugh again, and then she went quiet, and the building hummed, and somewhere down the hall the ice machine in the breakroom kicked on, that grinding sound it makes, and I waited because I've learned with her that she fills silence when she's ready and not before. She turned the pen over a couple more times. "I wondered too," she said. "For the record. Or whatever the whiteboard equivalent of for the record is."

"Yeah?"

"Don't make me say it twice, it's expensive." She pulled her feet up onto the rungs of her chair, which she does when she's staying a while. "I got divorced two years ago, Milo. Married my high school sweetheart at twenty-two, and he was a good man and we were bad at it, and I've spent six months being a person who works nights and goes to the co-op and sees her sister on Sundays. And I decided, somewhere in there, that nights are just for work. That's the deal I made with myself. You work, you fix the thing, you go home when the sun comes up, you don't blur it."

"That's a good deal."

"It's a great deal. It's held up for two years." She looked over at Logan's office, where the chair was still a dark shape against the glass. "And then there's tonight, which is not holding up the deal at all, and I want you to know I noticed that."

"I noticed it around eleven o'clock."

"I noticed it at the coffee cart," she said. "When Jaime was lecturing us about the yogurt and you looked at me over her shoulder like we shared a secret, and we didn't, we shared a bug, and I still felt it in my stomach, which is unprofessional."

"Very unprofessional."