Thin month. The two invoices from the last one came and cleared, and that money is spoken for and gone. It's the kind of month where the Mrs. moves the small stuff to the next one without being asked, and I pretend not to see her do it. She's got me hooked on some Danish crime series, and we're both pretending we can follow the plot. (I'm getting good at that.) The man who owes me five figures still hasn't answered the machine's reminder. That's the state of the books, going in.
Which matters, because on Friday an old colleague bought me two beers and offered me exactly what the books need.
We shared an office for six years, two jobs ago. Same systems, same bosses, same complaints. I left to build my own things; he stayed. He runs the IT of a pension fund now, two towns over. He has a backlog, a budget, and nobody on the market he trusts.
"Two days a week. Name your rate. Nobody checks what I pay."
Steady money, the number mine to pick, no selling required. The kind of money you can budget a life on. I felt it land under the ribs, warm, like the first sip on an empty stomach.
I said no before I'd heard myself think. Some decisions I make with my mouth and get briefed on afterwards.
He nodded, ordered two more, and moved on to his garden, as if he'd asked nothing bigger than whether I wanted another. Moles, ATM. He has a whole campaign going, traps and a map - an actual map - and he lost me somewhere around the third tunnel. He never once asked what I'm building instead. It took me a whole pint to notice that, and another to stop minding.
I used to have a theory that the men who stay fall asleep at their desks. He isn't asleep. He's content. I had those two filed as the same thing. The theory needs work.
Around eleven someone opened the piano. The pension-fund man knew all the words. I knew the low parts, and sang them louder than asked, as usual.
Anyway. Home, kitchen dark, shoes still on, I opened the rules file. If the machine reminds the people who owe me because my own hands won't, then by the same logic there should be a rule for offers like his: write them down, sleep on them, answer in the morning, mouth overruled. Rule three. I typed it three times and deleted it three times. Each time my thumb hit backspace before I'd decided anything. A company run on rules should want that rule. I closed the file.
Then I lay awake till two, doing the sum on two days a week at a rate nobody checks. No calculator needed for that one…
The machine didn't comment. It never does. That's our arrangement, for now.
Sittin' on the dock of the bay, wasting time.
— Otis Redding