“Joel?”

Joel jumped, nearly banging his head as he crawled out from under his desk. “I was just rerouting a few cables,” he said by way of an explanation.

Mr. Summerson merely nodded and said in a very authoritative manner, “I need you to look into a problem the marketing people are having with the new server. They need to roll back the data to a certain point.”

“Well, that depends…,” Joel started, worried about whether he had snapshots of old states of the system.

“I told them you’d be right down.”

With that, Mr. Summerson turned and walked away. A moment later one of the developers, a woman Joel found very attractive, stopped in front of his door and said, “He’s always like that. Don’t take it personally. Most of us call it a drive-by tasking.” She laughed and introduced herself. “My name’s Amy.”

Joel walked around his desk and met her at the door. “I’m Joel.”

After a moment of awkward silence Joel said, “I, er, better get on that thing.”

Amy smiled and said, “See you around.”

“Just focus on what you have to do to succeed,” Joel thought as he returned to his desk to search for that MySQL book he bought last week.