And I apologize to any programmers out there for the liberties I took with the job description. Programming is hard work—if it wasn’t everyone would be doing it. Obviously I don’t know a whole lot about it, but I do know a few programmers and I am in awe of them. :-D
Word count: 600
Genre: Crime
Character: A programmer
Material: A pencil
Sentence: "It was her!"
Bonus: Your character is imprisoned.
Sometimes my job can be really boring. A lot of what a programmer does is just sit in front of a computer screen looking at mile after mile of code streaming past, watching for errors – so mind numbingly boring. It’s no wonder I started amusing myself by taking a stroll through the bank’s computer system. I wasn’t looking for anything in particular, I was just curious.
Their firewalls were okay and security was pretty good, not as tight as I could have made it, but that’s not what I was there for. I was just there to upgrade the accounting software to the new system and figure out why it didn’t work with the old system.
I was pretty sure I had all the kinks worked out between the old and new programs, but I wanted to wait until it was running for a while to make sure. On a whim, to pass time while I waited, I decided to check the rest of their system, just to make sure everything else was running smoothly. I was doing them a favor, for crying out loud! I never expected to find anything amiss.
But wouldn’t you know it, a red flag went up on some purchase orders for pencils. You’d think with the bank finally getting on board with the computer age the number of pencils they were going through would be reduced, but that wasn’t the case. So I took a look to see why pencils of all things were a problem.
Not only was someone buying an excessive number of pencils, they were pretty pricey ones at that. Then I took a closer look. The pencils themselves weren’t expensive, but the bank was being charged an outrageous amount for them. And there was a big discrepancy between what the bank was being charged and what was paid to the manufacturer. Where was all that extra money going?
I should have just reported what I’d found right away, but I didn’t know how to do that without admitting I was poking around in something I shouldn’t have been in the first place. Instead I started tracing the money to where it was going. It was all going into a single account in the same bank – the idiot embezzling didn’t even have the sense to stash it in an offshore account. Taking an even closer look I discovered that the stealing had been going on for years, well before the bank started using computers.
Right about then someone complained about my work, that I was incompetent and took too long at my job. One of my friends warned me that the head teller, who’d been with the bank from the very beginning, was trying to get me fired.
That snide bitch hadn’t liked me from the moment I stepped foot in her bank. I played it cool though and continued with my job. And I still curious about who’d been accumulating all that money. Imagine my surprise when I uncovered the culprit. It was her!
I knew the ax was about to fall and I’d have to act quickly. So I did what I had to do, then I set a harmless virus to activate when the computer system updated in the morning. It was risk-free, honest. A joke. But it was enough to send me to prison for three years for messing with the bank’s computers.
But that just gives me three years to figure out how to spend that 4.7 million I transferred to a bank in the Cayman Islands.
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