‘This is my boy Robin,’ Ardagh told Isla.
‘Out of school early,’ Isla noted, as Robin followed his dad behind the counter.
‘Long story,’ Ardagh sighed.
Robin jumped out of his skin as a huge bang erupted on the counter he’d just stepped through. The giant farmer had raised and smashed down the chainsaw before leaning way over the counter and shouting.
‘You people are thieves!’ he spat at Rhongomaiwenua. ‘Take your offer? You can roll it into a ball and shove it up your …’
Robin saw Rhongomaiwenua pressing a red alarm button and two armed security guards shot out of a staff break room.
‘Does that happen a lot?’ Robin asked, as Isla unlocked a door and took them down a short flight of steps to a store room.
‘Only six times a day,’ Isla laughed. ‘People come in when they’re desperate. They don’t like it when we offer less money than they need. But when you’ve worked here as long as I have, it goes right over your head.’
Robin could hear the security guards and the big farmer in a muffled shouting match as Isla showed them a stack of tatty computers, aged screens, laptops and a black bin-bag stuffed to bursting with cables, mice and keyboards.
‘We had a big clear-out of stuff we’ll never sell,’ Isla explained. ‘Some of this works, some doesn’t. Take anything you want; the rest will go in the trash.’
Ardagh looked chuffed as he walked around the stack of aged IT gear.
‘I’ll take as much as I can fit in my car,’ he said keenly. ‘I teach a computer repair course at the library. We always need gear for the students to tinker with. Anything we clean up and get working is donated to a charity that supplies computers to schools in Congo.’
‘Beats going in the trash,’ Isla said brightly. ‘I’ll open up the back door, so you don’t have to carry all the stuff through the zoo out front.’
‘Ready for some lifting, son?’ Ardagh asked.
Robin grabbed a couple of laptops. ‘If these work, they’re better than the one I’ve got at home,’ he noted.
His dad spoke with unusual sharpness, as Isla found a hand trolley they could use. ‘Does today seem like a good day to be asking for a new laptop?’
‘I wasn’t,’ Robin answered defensively.
‘I’ve got to get back to my office to make some calls,’ Isla said.
‘No problem,’ Ardagh said. ‘Before you go, did anything happen about the system-security report I wrote?’
Besides his badly paid part-time job retraining unemployed auto workers in IT, Ardagh did freelance work as a white hat, a type of ‘good’ hacker paid to find weaknesses in security systems by trying to break into them. Robin was fascinated by anything to do with hacking, but shocked that his dad had written a report for Captain Cash.
‘I had to get an independent security audit for our insurance company,’ Isla explained, lowering her voice so nearby employees couldn’t hear. ‘Your report told me what I already knew: that our security here is hopeless. But when I called headquarters in Nottingham a month later … Nothing. They said there’s no budget allocation for IT improvements at this branch.’
Ardagh nodded and spoke so quietly Robin could barely hear. ‘When I’ve done other reports for King Corporation companies, I’ve had people take me aside and tell me to make sure I don’t find the very security problems I’m being paid to find. All management cares about is hitting quarterly profit targets and getting their bonus.’
Isla nodded. ‘King Corporation made 4.5 billion dollars last year, but my staff have to bring in their own pens, and I don’t think there’s a single chair in this branch that isn’t broken. It’s ridiculous … But listen, I’ve really got to go make this call. I hope the computers prove useful.’
‘They will, for sure,’ Ardagh said, as he started loading desktop PCs onto the hand trolley.