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I PULLED UP THE UNIVERSITY’S online directory, but it was so out-of-date, Bob Wilson was still listed as chair of the history department. In fact, Bob had “voluntarily” retired. Right after he’d publicly opposed the administration’s plan to make our general education sequence more “customer friendly” by removing the history requirement.
There was no way around it. I was going to have to speak to an actual person. I picked up the phone and dialed.
“IT department,” answered a pleasant male voice. “Atticus Marx speaking. Help you?”
He was new, of course. Mahina State both underpaid and understaffed the IT department. The predictable result was the kind of employee turnover you might expect to find among the Borgia family’s food-tasting staff.
I introduced myself and asked where I might find an up-to-date employee directory. I didn’t want to ask for Melanie Polewski’s email address specifically. Her name had been in the newspaper, and Mr. IT Guy might recognize it and get suspicious. I just needed Melanie’s campus username. Once I had that, I could guess her password and get into her email. Going through her email would certainly be a better use of my time than suffering through her appalling attempts at narrative nonfiction.
“We’re working on the update,” he said. “Should be done by September.”
“Oh, dear. September is three months from now. Do you have a draft of the new directory you can send me?”
“If we had that, we’d be almost done. I have our list of updates, though. If you want, I can shoot it over to you. It’s a mess, I gotta warn you.”
“No, the update list would be perfect, thank you.” I gave him my email address, thanked him again, and went to my inbox, where his message was already waiting with the attachment. Gold! There she was. Melanie Polewski, assigned username mpolew10.
I pulled up an incognito browser window and logged into the campus email as mpolew10. After a couple of tries at her password, I was in. (It was Ph@llusinwonderland.) I congratulated myself on my clever solution. Not only might Melanie’s email contain some useful clues, but the medium would have discouraged the stylistic excesses that made her fiction writing so painful to read.
I didn’t find anything remarkable right away. There were some routine human resources-related messages in her inbox, and some back and forth with her new English department colleague Nicole Nixon about meeting for lunch. Then I clicked on her ‘sent’ folder and was surprised to see a message addressed to me:
Hey Molly your the first one im writing to from this email guess what this is from my new job! At Mahina State! One year VAP position but I hear they have a permanent opening fingers crossed! OK I know your really bad with email haha so ill call.
It was perfectly Melanie, all friendly up until the little poison barb at the end. And she had my email address wrong by one letter, which was why I had never received it. I was surprised to see I was the first one she had written to from her new work account. Nothing in her sent mail folder had an earlier timestamp. Melanie and I hadn’t been very good friends, but apparently she didn’t have any better ones.
I closed the email program and went back to my paper. I made some comments and changes in the text, and then emailed Betty with the revised paper and the output showing my statistical analysis.
I was fortunate to have Betty Jackson as a collaborator. We’d gotten our work into some decent journals already, and she had a nice, rich dataset we could squeeze a few more pubs out of. One thing that made Betty a dream to work with was her top-notch time management. This was a skill developed out of necessity. Every year, Betty got stuck onto about fifty different high-profile committees, each one wanting to claim “diverse” membership.
The conference paper was now back on Betty’s desk. I’d crossed one task off my short to-do list, at least for now. And I had looked through Melanie’s email account, if not her computer files, so there were at least one and a half things checked off. My feeling of accomplishment evaporated as I realized I had one more task:
I still had to call Donnie to let him know I was returning his key.
Had I given it some thought, I might have realized it wasn’t necessary to call Donnie on the phone. I could have just put his key in an envelope and dropped it into the mailbox. For some reason, this elegant solution did not occur to me at the time.